I spent most of 1977 waiting for things to die. Disco. Wide collar Qiana shirts (but I repeat myself). Matching (or worse, contrasting) plaid sofa 'n' curtain 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 glimpse of its natural splendor, the director cuts inside a grungy taxi cab, where the main credits roll over a long close-up of a radio speaker as the dispatcher squawks out street names and addresses. This seems like an odd way to start a monster movie, but maybe it’s clever foreshadowing, and we’ll later find out that one of these apartments 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 has a foot fetish. A salty old sea captain wearing clamdiggers wanders around
on deck while we 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 add a disclaimer.)
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 Shelly Winters, a loving, caring, slatternly drunk who regales him
with tales of her latest one-night stand while chugging her first Bloody
Mary of the day. There’s also a mop-headed tween boy in the house who’s too
young to be either John’s son or Shelly’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 kidnapped a baby and 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.
A doctor
shows Claude x-rays of the sailor’s body, and says “even the marrow has been sucked
dry”, except he pronounces it “morrow”. But the soundtrack is kind of muddy, so
maybe he’s actually saying “even Vic Morrow has been sucked dry”, which I hope is true because it's a better way to go than being decapitated on the set of a crappy John Landis movie. We're told the missing baby was also reduced to bones, but we don't discover if the monster spat it out, or if its tiny skeleton was collected from a stool sample.
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 (possibly
the Jets, but 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,
Shelly has gone into town wearing a comically oversized sombrero like Speedy
Gonzales. We discover the Partridge Family tween is Shelly’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 it's amazing how much Shelly’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 decides to get revenge for his two deboned employees and checks
into the La Jolla Holiday Inn with his superhot Italian trophy wife, who played Athena in the Lou Ferrigno Hercules. Meanwhile, Shelly is shoveling ice cream into her face 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, Partridge Family Boy and Cousin
Oliver are obsessing about the sailboat race, raising the tantalizing hope they’ll get
skeletonized before they can break into a chorus of “It’s a Sunshine Day” or “Together
(Havin’ a Ball)”. Instead, Shelly (or the alien sombrero controlling her) frets
about how frequently Cousin Oliver has to urinate, while Partridge Family Boy affectionately calls his mother a fat whore.
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 did
give us a monster that makes all the meat fall off a baby, and where else can
you find that? Okay, maybe a Chile’s franchise on All You Can Eat Babyback Rib Night, but it’s still pretty rare.
Anyway,
hang with this sequence, I’m begging you, because it becomes hilarious when the
divers find a dozen large fish 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 are cruising around the Channel Islands in a yacht while
pretending to be Americans, but their boat has broken down, and so have their
accents. The big fat guy jumps in the water, and we cut to the giant octopus's eyes
popping open as we hear that “Dramatic Prairie Dog” music. This is like ringing the dinner bell for sea monsters, and the fat fake American tries to save himself by pretending to be Mexican.
Fake
American #1 shouts, “Shark’s gonna kill ya!” and if this were a better movie,
perhaps it would. Alas, Fat Fake Mexican is killed by poorly matched footage of
an octopus filched from a National Geographic TV special.
Back on the broken-down boat, Sherry Buchanan, who was born in Biloxi but worked exclusively in Italian films and is 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, sees the fat guy’s feet sticking straight up out of the water
(apparently he’s joined the sub-aquatic yoga class) and screams. This attracts
the octopus footage, which tears apart her boat.
Cut to Bo,
who suddenly figures out that the unseen monster is a giant octopus. How? Does he use
forensic evidence, or deductive reasoning? No, he employs the Think System, just
like Robert Preston in The Music Man.
“Are you
thinking about sharks?” The Sidekick asks, for no good reason.
“No,” Bo
replies. “I’m thinking…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 the 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 pose 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 new Italians find the wreck of the earlier Italians’ cabin cruiser, but before they can do anything about it, Athena’s boat turns
into a toy and sinks.
Athena
survives and clings to the first wreck, but almost immediately gets sexually
harassed to death by some Hentai tentacle porn.
Time for
the Death Beach Annual Child Endangerment Regatta!
Shelly
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 of the movie 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 learns that Shelly has entered 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 live and are
picked up by the Coast Guard, including Partridge Family Boy, but apparently he was out there long enough that 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 7th 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 he 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 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.