film

Film Review: Tentacles

As far as Jaws ripoffs, especially those of the Italian variety, are concerned, Tentacles doesn’t mess around. Within the first 5 minutes of the film, the movie’s antagonist – a giant octopus – has murdered an infant. And the movie barely slows down from there.

Poster for the movie "Tentacles"

Everything you’d expect from this kind of movie is there. We have an obstructionist local municipality that wants to downplay the killer animal for their own financial benefit – in this case, an environmentalist angle, with the killer octopus being rousted by seismic testing. We have a character who knows something’s wrong and won’t be dissuaded from further investigation – in this case, a journalist played by John Huston. We have an amalgamation of Quint and Hooper with a marine biologist (played by Bo Hopkins) who has 3 trained killer whales (who have the curved dorsal fin common to orcas in captivity who can’t get sufficient pressure on the fin to keep it straight, due to their enclosures). We even have a flotilla (literally) of kids in peril to be preyed on by the octopus.

Where things kind of stumble is these characters tend to be very separated from each other. Huston’s journalist never goes out in the water. The business executive whose project roused the octopus, played by Henry Fonda, is too much of a reasonable authority figure – his underling ends up being the one responsible for trying to suppress the octopus story. Further, Fonda’s character never meets with Hopkins.

This also isn’t helped by the fact that Tentacles can’t really throw that much blood into the equation – the octopus drags people underwater and drowns them, which is certainly an unpleasant death, but we don’t get the swells of crimson in the water that we’d get in Jaws.

It’s not a bad movie – there are several sequences where director Ovidio G. Assonitis gets to bring up some real tension – but ultimately while this isn’t a terrible Jaws knockoff, it’s still clearly a Jaws knockoff. You can make up for this with originality, or you can lean into the exploitation film side and crank up the sex and violence. This movie tries to go for the first but doesn’t quite pull it off, and it downplays the sleaze enough that it ends up being kind of wanting.

I didn’t hate Tentacles – and I certainly had a good time watching it – but I’m not really in a hurry to pick up a physical copy of this on its own. It feels like the kind of thing that would fit nicely into a “10 Jaws Knock-offs” Boxed set back when those were a thing.

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