Tentacles (1977)

John Huston! Shelley Winters! Henry Fonda! A big Octopus!

I spent most of 1977 waiting for things to die. Disco. Matching (or worse, contrasting) plaid sofa and drapery sets. Jaws rip-offs. But as history shows, all those trends still had a few years of life left in them, and instead, Elvis died.

It wasn't a great year for me, is what I'm saying.

But if you weren't me, if you were, to take a random example, a washed-up, aging American actor or a tow-headed, talent-free moppet, then times were good. Because no matter what else may have cratered in your life, chances were good that somewhere there was an Italian in tinted aviator glasses and hip-hugger double-knit slacks willing to point a movie camera at you.

Tentacles (1977)
Directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis (as Oliver Hellman)
Written by Jerome Max & Tito Carpi & Steven W. Carabatsos

The movie opens on a palisade overlooking the beach in La Jolla, one of the most scenic spots in Southern California. After giving us a brief taste of its natural splendor, the director cuts inside a taxi, where the main credits roll over a long close-up of a radio speaker as the dispatcher squawks out addresses. This seems like an odd way to start a movie about a tentacled monster, but maybe it’s clever foreshadowing, and we’ll later find out that one of these addresses is where the giant octopus lives.

A badly dubbed Italian actress gets a vacation to the Greater San Diego area, but pays for it when her baby is abducted from its stroller by a point of view shot.  Then the director decides his movie’s about feet, as a salty old sea captain wearing clamdiggers wanders around on deck while we get to enjoy his naked ankles. It’s implied that he’s grabbed by the monster and skeletonized, but we don’t have time to show that because there’s more feet coming, as John Huston’s shoes take a long walk to Claude Akin’s face. Claude’s the local Sheriff, John’s the local newspaperman, who offers his opinion that “We’re in for a nightmare!” (So while you and I may feel we have good grounds for a class action suit against this movie, the filmmakers were unfortunately smart enough to slap a disclaimer on it.)

John stays up all night, searching through books for the answer to these mysterious disappearances. He doesn’t find it, because they’re cookbooks, but if they ever do catch the giant octopus, the authorities can look forward to a zesty Polpi in Umido that’ll make you want to kiss your fingers.

John’s sister is Shelley Winters, a loving, caring, slatternly drunk who regales him with tales of her latest one-night stand while powering down her first Bloody Mary of the day. There’s also a mop-headed tween in the house who’s too young to be either John’s son or Shelley’s; I assume he’s a member of the Partridge Family who fell off the bus and nobody’s noticed yet.

Cut to Henry Fonda’s house, where he’s reaming out the Mayor from Animal House about John’s newspaper article, which implies Henry’s underwater construction company might have stolen all the meat off a man in capris pants. Henry appears both angry and confused by John’s insinuations, and though he doesn’t come right out and say it, you also get the feeling he’s deeply uneasy about the caliber of roles he’s being offered these days.

John decides to recruit the world’s foremost marine authority, Bo Hopkins, who we find at Sea World, telling the trainers to get tough with their killer whales. Bo would like to search for the sea monster, but four months ago he had a tragic diving accident (he got water in his ear, or something) and now he’s only qualified to yell at people for mollycoddling Shamu. Instead, he sends two of his best and most expendable divers. A harpsichord riff predicts they’re going to die.

The divers find that Henry Fonda’s high tech underwater tunneling equipment (so advanced, we’re told, that “Buck Rogers couldn’t have dreamed of it”) has been vandalized and stripped for parts. The police suspect a sub-aquatic street gang (probably the Sharks), but before anybody can break into a Jerome Robbins water ballet, a giant octopus squirts ink into the camera lens and murders the divers off screen so we can’t prove it in court. Nevertheless, the harpsichord wins five bucks.

Meanwhile, Shelley has gone into town wearing a comically oversized sombrero like Speedy Gonzales. We discover the Partridge Family kid is Shelley’s son, Tommy, and despite the constant string of gruesome deaths at sea, she wants to enter him and his friend, Cousin Oliver, in a sailboat race. (Pardon me for getting sentimental, but I had to pause here and dab away a nostalgic tear because of how much Shelley’s character reminds me of my mother. Although to be fair, Mom’s sombreros were more reasonably proportioned, and very few of her plots to kill me required an entrance fee.)

Bo checks into the La Jolla Holiday Inn with his super hot Italian wife (Delia Boccardo, who played Athena in the Lou Ferrigno Hercules), so he’s apparently going to be in this movie after all. Perhaps he realized that a business plan which consists of browbeating killer whale wranglers isn’t likely to net the filthy lucre that keeps an Italian trophy wife in rubies and Riunite.

John and Claude have a breakthrough in the case when John realizes all the victims had radio in common: the salty sea captain called the Coast Guard, and the divers were using two-way radios underwater. The baby didn’t have one, but it’s pram was right next to the taxi radio we saw during the opening credits, so apparently the monster is motivated to kill by long, pointless establishing shots.

We find Shelley shoveling down ice cream in a desperate attempt to appease the monstrous sombrero, which appears to be some kind of alien symbiote, like Spider-Man’s black costume. Even better, the Partridge Family kids are playing with walki-talki radios beside her, raising the tantalizing hope they’ll all get skeletonized before anyone can break into a chorus of “It’s a Sunshine Day” or “Together (Havin’ a Ball)”.

Athena is worried that if Bo goes diving he’ll die. But Bo assures her, in his creosote-thick Southern accident, that “the streets” taught him how to survive. But unless those streets were in Venice, I’m not sure his skills are really gonna transfer.

Hey, want to see Bo and a sidekick take snapshots while they cruise around in a two-man submersible craft they bought at a Thunderball garage sale? No? Well, I don’t think that’s really your decision, it’s the filmmakers’, and they haven’t steered us wrong yet, have they? I mean, they gave us a monster that makes all the meat fall off a baby, and where else can you find that? Okay, maybe at Chile’s on All You Can Eat Babyback Rib Night, but it’s still pretty rare.

Anyway, hang with this sequence, I beg you, because it becomes hilarious when the divers find a dozen mackerels doing headstands on the ocean floor. That’s not a metaphor, by the way, these are literal fish with their tails up, balancing on their noses, like we’ve wandered into an all-mackerel hot yoga class.

Meanwhile, some Italians pretending to be Americans are trying to enjoy a three hour tour of the Channel Islands, but their boat has broken down, and so have their accents. One of the heavy-set passengers (Franco Diogene, who played the impotent husband with the half-deflated love doll in Strip Nude for Your Killer) jumps in the water. Instantly we cut to an octopus’s eye popping open as we hear that “Dramatic Prairie Dog” music. Honestly, at this point it’s less a horror movie than a dog food commercial (“Octopi come running for the great taste of Cephalo-Chow. 100% Fake Americans. 100% Real Flavor.”)

Back on the broken-down boat we see (actual) American actress Sherry Buchanan. But even though Sherry was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, she worked exclusively in Italian films and TV, and here she’s dubbed by the same woman playing all the other female parts, making her an American pretending to be an Italian pretending to be an American—which I think qualifies as a hat trick in this movie). She sees Franco’s feet sticking straight up out of the water (apparently he’s joined the sub-aquatic yoga class) and screams. This summons the octopus footage—even though it’s been established the creature is attracted by radio signals, not voices—which is so irritated by this obvious lapse in continuity that it tears apart her boat.

Cut to Bo, who has figured out that the unseen monster is a giant octopus. How? Did he employ forensic evidence, or deductive reasoning? No, he used the Think System, just like Robert Preston in The Music Man.

“Are you thinking about sharks?” The Sidekick asks.

“No,” Bo replies. “I’m thinkin’…Giant octopus.”

So there you go. If your movie features a mysterious killer creature, but you don’t want to go to all the trouble of figuring out clues, just have one of your characters think of the solution! It works equally well for cryptids and cornet-playing.

Now let’s watch Bo’s wife Athena standing in the prow of a yacht as it heads out to sea. Nothing happens, but the shot goes on so long you keep expecting her to break into “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Funny Girl.

Later that night, Athena and two Italians find the other Italians’ cabin cruiser, half submerged like Ben Gardner’s boat from Jaws. They search the wreck like Richard Dreyfuss did, but just to make it dull they don’t find a severed head. Instead, Athena’s boat turns into a toy and gets sunk.

Athena survives and clings to the first wreck, but almost immediately gets sexually harassed to death by some Hentai tentacle porn.

Now it’s time for Ocean Beach’s Annual Child Endangerment Regatta!

Shelley sees the two brats off to their doom, then we cut to Bo and John and Claude sitting around a classroom somewhere. John tries to sell the premise by saying, “I’ve read that the suckers on a tentacle are like the claws of a tiger.” Bo one-ups him by taking a Harold Pinter-sized pause before answering, more in sorrow than in anger, “Compared to suckers on a tentacle, claws are nothing…Nothing.”

John hears that his sister Shelley has entered all the local sitcom kids into a boat race, and declares the “giant squid” must be destroyed. He asks Bo, “Can you do it?”

Bo winds up for another big pause, then says, “I only got one thought on my mind…Just one.”

Calamari.

Meanwhile, the monster massacres the boating children. This is symbolized by shots of young actors in life jackets staring open-mouthed at the camera while a prop octopus head gets towed behind a speedboat, making it seem like the creature wants to water ski, but can’t quite keep his tips up.

Some kids are picked up by the Coast Guard, including Shelley’s son Tommy, but apparently he had to eat Cousin Oliver to survive.

Bo tows a huge yellow tank into the ocean. It contains his two pet killer whales, which he’s going to use to hunt down the octopus like a couple of coon hounds. He delivers a long speech celebrating all the “love” and “affection” in their hearts, but the tank sinks and the orcas leave him, proving just how intelligent this species is. If we were half as smart, we'd all have stripped to our skivvies and be clinging to a fin right now.

Having accidentally freed the Willys, Bo and Sidekick are forced to dive into the ocean with spearguns, where they spend the next two minutes getting startled by marine life making weird sound effects, in what feels like a Candid Camera episode directed by Ivan Tors. (Sidekick is frightened by a grouper operating what sounds like a staple gun, while Bo pees himself when he’s pranked by a manta ray with a snare kit).

The octopus buries Bo under an avalanche of coral and proceeds to taunt him, but the Orcas arrive in the nick of time like the 7^th Calvary, then everybody turns into a puppet and things get confusing. The killer whales play tug of war with the monster while the Red Army Choir starts singing the Soviet national anthem out of nowhere. It's an odd needle drop for the end of a monster movie, and I can only assume the octopus ate the composer.

Sidekick rescues the hapless, buried Bo and gets him to the surface, making me wish I’d learned his name, because apparently he’s the hero of the film. Meanwhile the orca puppets dismember the octopus puppet, severely reducing its collectible value. So while this film wasn't terribly original, I give it points for trying: in most monster movies, the monster seemingly dies, only to reappear a couple years later in a sequel. In this Tentacles, the monster died, then reappeared in the same film as an appetizer platter from Red Lobster.

And frankly? I’ll risk death by sucker if it means getting a fistful of those Cheddar Bay Biscuits.