Tentacles (1977) Review

WEEK 5: SOMETHING SMELLS FISHY

Tentacles (1977) Review

Tentacles was one of the many immediate attempts to capitalize on the success of Jaws, but interestingly enough, there are few references to sharks in this film, and aside from a couple “action” scenes and the whole thing taking place at a seaside community, it is comparable to Jaws in few other ways. The main way they differ is in terms of filmmaking quality.

The only two names that stood out to me in the credits were John Huston, who plays a news reporter, and Henry Fonda, who’s credited as “Mr. Whitehead”. Wow, that’s a real nice name for the Academy Award-winning actor in your movie. They might as well call him Zit. Anyway, the news reporter is sort of the main character (what do you mean sort of? I’ll get to it) along with his slightly strange sister, who has a son and looks after another woman’s son the whole movie, but at first it seems they’re both her sons, which was a little confusing. The reporter investigates the strange deaths that have occurred, which leads him to the oceanographic institute nearby. For the rest of the movie, it cuts unevenly back and forth from the orca trainer who works there, to his wife and her associates on a boat, to the reporter and his investigating, and then to the sister, who is taking her boys to a sailboat race. I could never tell what the main story thread was exactly, and as a result, it’s not really clear who the main character is. There are many peripheral characters with growing emphasis placed on them, perhaps to create tension so the audience doesn’t know who might die and who might live. In the end, I wished they had all died.

When I put on Tentacles, I was actually hopeful, and to begin with, the movie isn’t that bad. In fact, I thought the opening scene was great. First we get the point of view of the octopus in the ocean, right beside the breakwater. Up on the sidewalk above, a mother is playing with her baby in its stroller. She runs across the street to see her friend (an incredibly stupid thing to do, mind you, but that’s beside the point) and the whole time she’s talking, the audience’s eyes are drawn to the baby stroller in the background. Traffic passes by, and after a school bus passes, the baby is gone. It’s pretty well shot, and only a few minutes later, another one of the octopus’ victims pops out of the water looking decayed and disgusting, and it makes for a genuinely shocking jump scare. But then, the movie starts to go downhill, and Tentacles started suctioning the fun out of my soul, until I was as empty inside as the cadavers the octopus leaves behind. 

I’ll start with the short list of the remaining things I liked that I haven’t already mentioned. There’s a moment where the sister character is saying to her son that he should have her as a sailboat partner so they would definitely win, and the kid burns her with this reply: “We’d need a tornado to move the boat!” She acts offended, and then he says, “You’re plump mom, there’s more of you to love.” This makes her feel better, instead of upsetting her more. It’s random and pretty funny. Later on the octopus attacks the sailboat race contestants and eats the boys’ boat, making it seem like they both got devoured. Unfortunately only one of them died, but it turns out it was the boy she was supposed to be watching out for! Awkward! And then it’s never mentioned again. Lastly, the underwater photography is pretty well shot.

Now for the bad stuff, which is pretty much everything else. The dialogue is sometimes weird, but mostly uninteresting, and the dubbing is horrendous. I’ve seen Godzilla movies from the sixties with words matched more accurately to moving mouths. It turns out Tentacles is an Italian film, even though it was filmed in California, which accounts for the bad dubbing I guess. The music is repetitive, in no way induces scariness, and just plain sucks. There’s a scene where some people are swimming, and it’s established the octopus is lurking nearby, and the whole time I was just waiting—hoping—it would attack someone. The music goes berserk, the camera zooms in, there’s bubbles—oh man, here it comes!—but it turns out to just be his friend. And then, they use this same false scare again less than a minute later. I could not believe it. Nothing else, aside from that early scene with the corpse, is scary. The first glimpse of the octopus comes when it attacks a couple divers, and it produces a giant cloud of ink (which they only do to escape predators in real life) before eating him. There’s a strange scene later on where some other divers find a bunch of dead tuna anchored upside down on the sea bed bottom. I guess the octopus was saving them for later? Or did they all just happen to sink to the bottom in the exact same way? Doesn’t matter, it’s never explored in detail.

It takes well over an hour before one of the octopus attacks is properly shown. It goes after a girl on a boat, but the attack is short and unremarkable. This movie actually had a lot of potential, but it was all so badly executed. The biggest overarching problem is one that’s popped up in a few other disappointing killer animal films I’ve seen, and that is the issue of the characters taking too long to discover what is killing people. More precisely, people finding out what it is, and then surviving to tell the masses about it. Some movies can get away with delaying this if there’s other interesting things going on, but this is not one such example. I think it’s about 25 minutes before the ending that they finally catch on to the fact that an octopus is what’s causing the deaths.

Speaking of the ending, I have to mention how the octopus is killed. The orcas from the oceanographic institute are released on it like wolves of the sea, and the way they filmed the orcas ripping the octopus apart is by having plastic bath toy whales jabbing at a real-life octopus (which was dead before filming began, luckily) in a water tank. It is such a hilariously misguided attempt to make an exciting ending that it briefly pulled me out of my misery before the end credits. I suppose that’s one more positive.

Aside from a promising opening and a fascinatingly disastrous ending, Tentacles is not really worth your time. If you’re into older creature features or B-movies, you might want to give this a watch over Octopus and Octopus 2, but otherwise, I’d say stick with those ones to satisfy your cinematic calamari craving.