Tentacles (film)

Tentacles (Tentacoli) is a 1977 horror-thriller film directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis and starring John Huston, Shelley Winters, Bo Hopkins, Cesare Danova, Delia Boccardo and Henry Fonda.

When numerous people go missing in a seaside resort town, a reporter discovers that a rampaging giant octopus is terrorizing the coast. While a marine biologist attempts to stop the octopus before more tourists fall victim to the creature, it appears that a corporation may be connected to the cephalopod's murderous behavior.

Although the film was intended to cash in on the success of Jaws, Tentacles also bears numerous resemblances to the 1955 science fiction giant monster horror film It Came from Beneath the Sea.

Plot
People are turning up dead at Solana Beach, a seaside tourist resort, their skeletons picked clean of flesh and bone marrow. The local sheriff has no leads, but newspaper reporter Ned Turner suspects the construction of an underwater tunnel by the Trojan company, owned by Mr. Whitehead. Whitehead threatens Turner to leave it alone, but after several more deaths, he interrogates killer whale trainer and marine expert Will Gleason.

When two of Gleason's divers are also killed, Gleason goes to investigate for himself and determines the attacks are the result of Trojan using ultrasonic drilling techniques with which the sound waves have been "above regulated levels", which maddens a giant octopus, causing it to attack and devour human swimmers and boaters whenever it feels similar frequencies. Criticizing him for risking his life, his wife Vicky joins her sister at the pool. When her sister goes on a boating expedition and also goes missing, Gleason's wife goes in search and is also killed by the octopus.

In the meantime, Turner's sister Tillie has taken her young son to a boating race, from which he is one of the few to miraculously survive. Gleason vows to kill the octopus and takes his trained killer whales out to where his wife was killed.

In the end, the octopus is killed by that pair of killer whales while Gleason tries to save another diver.

Production
Tentacles was produced to capitalize on the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, and as such was produced on a much smaller budget of $750,000.

The initial script was much more comedic and satirized the "killer animal" subgenre, but after executive producer Samuel Z. Arkoff had his writer Steven W. Carabatsos retool it, it became much more serious.

Casting
The lead actors were American, while the supporting cast was mostly Italian.

Ovidio G. Assonitis' first choice to play the lead role was John Wayne. Wayne accepted the role, but after Assonitis met him at his home in Texas, he realized the actor was far too ill to play the part (Wayne would ultimately die of cancer in June 1979).

Assonitis turned to Henry Fonda, who had recently appeared in a string of Italian productions. However, the actor suffered a heart attack shortly before filming. Since Fonda had already taken a large advance, he was given the supporting role of Mr. Whitehead, while John Huston replaced Fonda in the lead role. Assonitis and Huston got along so well that the former subsequently cast him in another lead role, in The Visitor (1979).

Filming
Filming took place on location in Atlanta, Georgia (where Assonitis would later shoot The Visitor and Madhouse), and Oceanside, Pismo Beach, and San Diego, California. The aquarium sequences were shot at Marineland of the Pacific in Los Angeles County. The underwater sequences were shot in Italy.

Initially storyboarded was a sequence in which the octopus destroys the Golden Gate Bridge, but the sequence was cut due to time and budgetary constraints.

During filming, the production lost the large rubber octopus in the sea, so the rest of the film was shot with a diver waving the only remaining tentacle.

Music
The film's score was done by Italian composer Stelvio Cipriani, who scored the similarly Jaws-inspired films The Great Alligator and Piranha II: The Spawning around the same time.

Release
The film was released theatrically by Euro International Films in Italy on February 25, 1977. In the United States, the film was distributed by American International Pictures, opening in New York on August 3, 1977, and in Los Angeles on August 31, 1977.

The film was a box office success, grossing $3,000,000.

For the U.S. release, several cast and crew adopted "American"-sounding aliases, including director Ovidio G. Assonitis (as "Oliver Hellman"), composer Stelvio Cipriani ("S.W. Cipriani"), editor Angelo Curi ("A.J. Curi") and actor Enzo Bottensi ("Alan Boyd").

Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 0% based on seven reviews, with a weighted average rating of 2.6 out of 10.

Contemporary reviews were also negative. Lawrence Van Gelder of The New York Times called it "an all-too-familiar giant octopus movie" that suffered from "atrocious acting in minor roles", "occasionally poor dubbing" and "a totally unoriginal story". Variety noted that although "John Huston, Shelley Winters and Henry Fonda may bolster prospects", they "are all squandered in this one, thanks to a leaden script plus wooden direction by Oliver Hellman (who's also producer Ovidio Assonitiz)". Linda Gross of the Los Angeles Times dismissed it as "a tedious movie, nightmarishly slow and intermittently out of synch". Tom Milne of The Monthly Film Bulletin declared: "A devastatingly silly rehash of the Jaws formula, atrociously scripted, stiltedly acted, and reaching its low point in a grotesquely maudlin finale where the hero pours his heart out in a pep talk to the whales he has trained to graduate standards of communication." Marjorie Bilbow of Screen International wrote, "The special effects are good and there is a fair amount of suspense before each victim is tentacled. But involvement with the characters is minimal ... the excitement lies only in anticipating when the next plastic victim will get nabbed."

Home media
The Film was released on CED Videodisc in 1982. The film was released on DVD by MGM in 2005 as part of their Midnite Movies series. The disc was a double feature release, pairing the film with Empire of the Ants. It was released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber in April 2022.