Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the next installment of A Movie A Day: Halloween 2010 edition!
[For the entirety of October I will be showcasing one horror film each day. Every film is pulled from my DVD shelf or streamed via Netflix Instant and will be one I haven’t seen. Unlike my A Movie A Day or A Movie A Week columns there won’t necessarily be connectors between each film, but you’ll more than likely see patterns emerge day to day.]
Wow, what a terrible movie. You can’t get more amateurish than this film. It’s so half-assed… But I found myself strangely enjoying parts of it.
Sure, there are some horrendously over-the-top moments and terrible decisions that are entertaining… like Bo Hopkins’ impassioned speech to a pair of Orcas or Shelley Winters’ comically oversized straw sombrero or a redubbing that makes a 10 year old boy sound like a chain smoking octogenarian… those are fun, but there’s more than just a “so bad it’s good” quality to this movie.
Nobody’s ever said this before about a movie called TENTACLES, but it made me think a bit, reflect on the state of cheaply made junk food cinema.
As cheap as this film is, and it certainly is, there’s a production value to it that isn’t as radically removed from the A-list studio pictures of the day as today’s cheap schlockfests are.
I wonder exactly why that is. There are shots in Tentacles that feel like they could have come out of Jaws. Film stock, lighting, all of that. Why is there such a radical gap between today’s cheap B movies and the studio pictures?
It wouldn’t be fair to compare Tentacles to something like Sharktopus because as cheap and schlocky as Tentacles is there was still a real production team behind it with a budget. Not a massive budget, but they were still able to pay Henry Fonda, John Huston, Shelley Winters and Bo Hopkins to do this horrible movie.
Still there seemed to be a level of professionalism that hardly exists in the like movies of today. There could be more money back then because of the drive-in market and low cost of crew.
I don’t know, but the movie made me think on it a bit. Not bad for a horrible Jaws rip-off.
And I usually like Jaws rip-offs. Great White, Piranha, Alligator, Alligator 2, Blood Beach… okay, Blood Beach is a stretch, but you can’t deny Jaws’ influence. Hell the poster’s tagline was a play on Jaws’. “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water… you couldn’t get there!”
There’s a fun to these movies and some of that fun does make it into Tentacles. If only there was as much care put into the character work as there was in casting great past-their-prime actors we’d have something you could like unironically.
Story-wise it's nothing new. Developers are building some kind of underwater tunnel and an overzealous evil rich guy is using technology that sends out high pitch radio waves ("way over the legal limit" we're told in the movie) that is killing fish and disturbing the ecosystem. And, apparently, also pissing off a giant octopus enough to eat babies and get a taste for human flesh.
No kidding, in one of the movie's better moments, the octopus eats a baby... off camera. If it was on camera this would be one of my favorite movies of all time.
John Huston's a reporter trying to figure out why bodies are appearing in the tide, Shelley Winters is an annoying mother who allows her son and his friend to go out racing schooners, Henry Fonda is the CEO of the corporation blasting the tunnel that somehow creates this monster and Bo Hopkins is an Orca trainer at a local sea park.
That sounds like a lot of people, but the only one that really matters is Hopkins. After his wife it tentacled to death he makes it his mission to take out the octopus. The rest of the cast have half-arcs, the beginnings of a character that don't really ever go anywhere.
The dialogue in the movie is just head scratching. It’s like something an ESL student who just saw his first movie would write. There are moments that aren’t far removed from “Hi there, I’m your sister and you’re my brother and our parents are dead and I’m fat and you’re single!”
Every line is explaining the story or character to the audience, not actually telling a story or creating someone even partially believable.
Look, I’m not expecting Shakespeare out of a movie called Tentacles, but there’s having fun and there’s scraping by. Look at other cheesy films from this era… From Blaxploitation (Coffy, Black Belt Jones, Truck Turner) to horror (Black Christmas, Devil Times Five) you can tell the filmmakers gave a shit. Sometimes the focus is just on having a good time, but here there is no focus other than “this is how they did it in Jaws.”
You know what this movie reminds me a lot of? The Swarm. Both are really bad movies, but have high level actors involved in a substandard production. I like Tentacles more than The Swarm but that’s more because The Swarm is, like, 487 minutes long.
There are takes where actors flub their lines and still keep going. John Huston at one point says they’re going after a Giant Squid, not an octopus. Shelley Winters has a minute long scene where her character seems to be obsessed with the amount of urine her preteen son’s best friend releases in a day. Henry Fonda spends 80% of his screentime on a phone. There’s no resolution to the majority of characters in favor for a big octopus vs. killer whale fight… which is cool, don’t get me wrong.
If there’s one aspect they didn’t cheap out on it’s the effects. That’s not to say that the giant octopus looks real and threatening in any way, but I was expecting something much, much cheesier than what I got.
Also, Stelvio Cipriani’s pounding score is surprisingly good. It doesn’t fit the movie at all, mind you, but it’s a great adventure score.
But good lord it’s painful to watch these great actors try to keep a shred of dignity while appearing onscreen in this movie. You’ll feel bad for Henry Fonda and Bo Hopkins and Shelley Winters. John Huston seems to be having a good time, though. He doesn’t have the same embarrassed look in his eyes that Fonda has throughout the movie.
Final Thoughts: For a fan of schlocky ‘70s cinema this is certainly worth a watch and it stands heads and shoulders above what passes itself off as B grade cinema today, but that by no means excuses the amateur hour execution of this film. If you want a water based horror movie from this era that’s genuinely fun look at Roger Corman’s HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP or PIRANHA. Corman got it.
Currently in print on DVD: YES
Currently available on Netflix Instant: YES
Here are the next week’s worth of AMAD titles:
Tuesday, October 5th: BAD RONALD (1974)
Wednesday, October 6th: THE ENTITY (1983)
Thursday, October 7th: DOCTOR X (1932)
Friday, October 8th: THE RETURN OF DOCTOR X (1939)
Saturday, October 9th: THE TENANT (1976)
Sunday, October 10th: MAN IN THE ATTIC (1953)
Monday, October 11th: NEW YEAR’S EVIL (1980)
See ya’ tomorrow for the cult classic made for TV movie BAD RONALD, put out by the good folks at Warner Archive!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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