Plot
When people start mysteriously
disappearing in a small seaside resort, a reporter believes that it has
something to do with an underwater construction project run by a local
businessman. However as more people go missing, the reporter and his marine
expert friend come to suspect that there may be something more deadly in the
water - a giant octopus.
Review
The slew of Jaws
rip-offs/clones/imitators/cash-ins that sprung up in the wake of Spielberg's
masterpiece is no surprise given cinema's penchant for beating a dead horse to
death and trying to make as much money out of popular fads. One of the earliest
and one of the worst is this stinker from Italy featuring a giant octopus in the
role of nature's death bringer. I can't really remember too many Jaws
rip-offs being any good (Piranha probably being the pick) and the rest
seem to be gunning for the title of "worst Jaws rip-off ever made." Well
it's quite possible that we have a winner here with Tentacles, although
the competition is extremely tough!
Like the others, the script clearly borrows heavily from Jaws, including
the now traditional "monster attacks local regatta" scene and a grisly corpse
popping out the water to scare someone ala the disembodied head in the boat
scene. But borrowing something doesn't mean to say it will work again and in
this case, nothing works that has been plagiarised because there's no build-up
or anticipation.
There's just no tension or
excitement at all. Attack scenes have no suspense and they're almost
blood-free which is a crime given that this is an Italian exploitation flick and
you can usually bank on them being gory.
It's also a bit harder to get worked up about a killer octopus than it is a killer
shark but at least make the effort. The octopus just isn't given any credibility
or channel enough fear to make it appear a real threat. In fact no one realises
the culprit is an octopus for a long time, meaning that the human scenes are
seemingly pointless. At least the main character in Jaws knew that it was
a shark and therefore even though the shark was not in the scene, it was still
being talked about and made to seem like a serious threat. By the time the
characters have figured out the score here, the film is half way through.
The strength with Jaws was that when it was on land,
the story kept moving forward and the characters were interesting and well-acted
to keep you going until the next time the shark attacked. But that's not the
case here as the land scenes are terribly dull and uninteresting. Even when the
characters do occasionally go out to sea, they do nothing but scuba dive. If you
like scuba diving then maybe this is the film for you as there's lots of it.
It's all well-filmed underwater and the sea looks nice and clean but it's not
exciting.
The special effects are not so special and the octopus seems
to be just stock footage of an ordinary octopus which is then edited into the
film to make it look like it's attacking people. I think there are a couple of
prop tentacles used in attack scenes but the effects are all so poor, it's hard
to distinguish between them all. There is arguably the world's
worst toy boat prop used for one scene in which the octopus drags it underwater. And to top it all off, the octopus is killed at the end by a couple
of killer whales that one of the characters had been looking after at a local
sea resort. The killer whales look like hand puppets and it's very feeble. To
top it off, there are some big names in the cast including John Huston, Shelley
Winters and Henry Fonda however none of them has any sort of interaction with
the octopus at all. They all disappear about two thirds of the way in which is
probably a good thing as the script is dire anyway so the less talking these
people do on screen, the better it is.
Verdict
Tentacles is pretty much
unwatchable. It's not even remotely "bad" enough to watch for a laugh. I'd like
to think of some octopus joke to round this review off but the film has sapped
my creative juices from me!
