BY TODD GARBARINI
Who
should we blame for the execrable Tentacles? Samuel Z. Arkoff? The cast?
The pazzo Italians who made it? Steven Spielberg, for heaven’s sake?
This ridiculous yarn should be retitled with another word beginning with “T”
and ending with “s” that is also comprised of nine letters because it takes a
huge pair of them to put so many well-known performers into one film and give
them nothing to do.
Tentacles, was filmed in 1976 and unleashed on New
Yorkers on Wednesday, August 3, 1977 during the Summer of Sam, when Michael
Anderson’s Orca: The Killer Whale and Rene Cardona, Jr.’s Tintorera:
Killer Shark, among other cinematic indignities were also in theaters, assuaged only by George
Lucas’s Star Wars. The movie commits one of the genre’s gravest sins – it’s
boooooring. To boot, it lacks the cheeze factor that makes movies like this fun
to watch. Running a full 102 minutes, the exact same running time as William
Friedkin’s masterful The French Connection (1971), Tentacles posits
an octopus with tentacles (octopi have limbs, not tentacles, as squids do, but
no one told the screenwriters) off the coast of Solana Beach in California who
is annoyed by the unauthorized use of radio frequencies by Mr. Whitehead (Henry
Fonda), a corrupt owner of a construction company and his assistant (Cesare
Danova, unrecognizable from his turn as Harvey Keitel’s mafioso uncle in Martin
Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Streets). The angry squid makes its way near
people to serve them up as dinner. A sheriff (Claude Akins running through
Stanislavski’s Seven Pillars Acting Technique before starring in The
Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo from 1979 to 1981) is confused as to how
people are dying; a reporter (John Houston in a role that makes you wonder if he was financially solvent at the time)
pursues leads to “get the story” as another feather in his cap; Bo Hopkins
reluctantly comes to the rescue with killer whales that ultimately do in the
titular creature; and the always reliable Shelley Winters comes along for the
ride but spends most of her time yelling at children. Apparently, Auntie Roo
isn’t dead after all.
The
movie is completely devoid of interest and suspense except for a clone of the
Ben Gardner-inspired head-bobbing death scene from Jaws (1975) and the
disappearance of a child from the beach in a visually interesting sequence
featuring the winner of the World’s Worst Mother of the Year award. The production’s “inspiration”, if you can call it that, is clearly Mr.
Spielberg’s aforementioned suspense masterpiece, however it bears more of a resemblance
to Robert Gordon’s 1955 sci-fi film It Came from Beneath the Sea, though
that black and white film possessed something that Tentacles lacks –
entertainment value.
Tentacles played in my area on a double bill
with Bert I. Gordon’s Empire of the Ants (1977) at a theater that went
exclusively adult prior to becoming a supermarket (an obscenity of a different
kind) and at a drive-in with Michael Campus’s The Mack (1973) with
Richard Pryor as the second feature, which put poor Mr. Pryor in the unenviable
position of making comatose people laugh.
What
Tentacles does have is a series of truly beautiful poster art used in
the film’s marketing campaign that, while colorful and exciting to behold,
advertise the film as something that it ultimately fails to deliver.
Apparently,
Kino Lorber couldn’t find anyone willing to sit down and talk about this
monstrosity (pun most definitely intended), as they have either all passed on or
are currently in prison after having murdered their agents and managers after
appearing in this film.
The
only extras to speak of are both the radio spot and theatrical trailer for the
film, and trailers for The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972), The Island of
Dr. Moreau (1977), Parasite (1983), Tintorera...Tiger Shark
(1977), Zoltan...Hound of Dracula (1977), Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978), Without Warning (1980), Deepstar Six (1989), and Deep
Rising (1998).
If
you’re going to watch a film about an octopus, I would recommend the highly
enlightening My Octopus Teacher (2020) as an alternate, championed by
Mr. Friedkin himself when I asked him about new films that he would recommend.
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