You haven’t truly lived until you’ve seen Henry Fonda deliver an entire performance from a telephone, watched John Huston try to out-act a floating pool toy, and witnessed a pair of killer whales avenge the death of Shelley Winters. If that sounds like your idea of a quiet Saturday night, then Tentacles—Ovidio G. Assonitis’ Jaws-wannabe-slash-octopus-therapy-session—is your siren song. This movie is what happens when you ask Italy to make seafood horror with a million-dollar budget and a leftover octopus from Sesame Street. The results are just chewy enough to swallow, if you’re into saltwater schlock served with a straight face.
The Monster Beneath the Budget
Conceived as a transparent cash grab after Jaws chewed its way through the 1975 box office, Tentacles emerged from the depths of European financing and sweaty desperation. Italian producer-director Ovidio G. Assonitis—credited pseudonymously as “Oliver Hellman,” because nothing screams “this is legit” like a fake Anglo name—had the dream of scaring America’s beachgoers again. Instead, he built a life-sized rubber octopus for nearly a million bucks, which promptly sank into the ocean like his dignity.
Originally envisioned as a satire of the killer-animal craze (which might’ve actually worked), the script was rewritten into something dead serious—because nothing heightens terror like people solemnly debating marine sonar levels. Assonitis also wanted John Wayne in the lead, proving he could dream bigger than his insurance policy. Wayne was too ill. Then he turned to Henry Fonda, who agreed, suffered a heart attack, and was promptly parked in a chair with a rotary phone. That left John Huston—yes, The Maltese Falcon John Huston—to try and glue this tentacled mess together.
Huston, Fonda, Winters, and Whales—Oh My
The casting reads like a Hollywood fever dream after a three-martini lunch. John Huston delivers lines like he’s negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, Shelley Winters acts like she’s in The Poseidon Adventure 2: Electric Boogaloo, and Bo Hopkins channels both the marine biologist and the grizzled sea dog from Jaws with all the subtlety of a boat motor to the face. Hopkins even gives an emotional pep talk to a pair of killer whales. That’s not a metaphor. He literally encourages his orca pals before they go punch a cephalopod to death.
The plot sloshes forward like a tidepool full of discarded exposition. People in the scenic (and very real) town of Solana Beach start turning up stripped to the bone, and the local sheriff can’t tell an octopus from a tuna can. A reporter (Huston), a marine expert (Hopkins), and a company with a name so generic it might as well be “Evil Corp Inc.” all point fingers while the octopus eats kids and scuba divers indiscriminately. For those keeping score at home: plot logic drowned on day one, somewhere off the coast of Pismo Beach.
Meanwhile, the big creature itself—our eight-legged antihero—is often represented by a single, flailing rubber arm. After the original model sank, production literally sent a diver underwater to manually wave a tentacle. I’m not making that up. It’s like watching a bathtub puppet show staged by unionized sea cucumbers.
Reviews That Should Have Been Written in Ink
Upon release, critics collectively blew a raspberry. The New York Times shrugged it off as reheated Jaws chowder, while Variety correctly diagnosed “atrocious acting” and “wooden direction,” possibly confusing the octopus for the lead actor. The film’s Rotten Tomatoes score currently hovers at an elegant zero percent, which feels both earned and a bit harsh—like giving a participation ribbon to a sunken sponge.
But somehow, Tentacles wriggled into cult status. It aired on German television as part of the SchleFaZ (Worst Films Ever) series, which is like the Criterion Collection of cringe. MGM bundled it in a DVD double feature with Empire of the Ants, another eco-horror gem from the “nature hates you” subgenre. And in 2022, Kino Lorber gave it the full Blu-ray treatment, proving that no monster—rubber, CGI, or otherwise—ever truly dies in the home video market.
The film now lives on as a trivia night punchline and a camp curiosity. It’s a monument to the belief that if you throw enough stars, glue, and seawater at a script, you might just entertain people in the most baffling way possible.
Epilogue: The Ink Blots of Glory
If Tentacles had embraced its inner silliness instead of solemnly flailing through the motions, it might’ve become a masterpiece of madness. Instead, it floats in that cinematic purgatory of “so-bad-it’s-fascinating,” a sushi platter of bad dubbing, melodrama, and mollusk-induced mayhem. It’s a film you watch once, talk about for a week, and then forget—until the next time you’re drunk in a video store or get dared at a horror marathon.
⭐️⭐️ (2/5)
#ReleaseTheSuck #OctoFlop #ShelleyWintersDeservedBetter #JawsButDumber #WhalesForJustice #HenryFondaSitsItOut #DeepSeaDisaster
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