Tentacoli (1977)

Directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis [Other horror films: Chi sei? (1974), There Was a Little Girl (1981), Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1982)]

Commonly known in the USA as Tentacles, Tentacoli is a movie that could have been better. As it is, it’s not a bad time, but it can be a bit dry, and perhaps there’s not enough action to bolster it.

I first heard of this film in a rather unconventional way. See, I’m a big music guy – I listen to pretty much everything (save blues and jazz), and some of what I listen to is quite out of the mainstream. There’s a band called Tentacle PornMonster, sort of a pornogrind/goregrind mix, and their song ‘The End Of The Tentacle Orgy On The Beach’ starts off with a trailer for this movie, finishing off with calling it the ‘most gripping suspense you will ever experience.’

Since that point, I’ve wanted to see it, and some years later, I did. I can’t really remember much about what I thought about Tentacoli the first time I saw it – certainly I recall the regatta sequence – but while I find it a decent time, I can’t say that there weren’t quite a few times when the film wasn’t that engaging.

There’s no doubt in my mind the best scene is the aforementioned junior regatta. A bunch of young kids go out on a yacht race, but something else (and by ‘something else,’ I mean a giant octopus, not Marjean Holden) wants to join in on the festivities. It’s a good sequence from the beginning parade with the jaunty music to the flash-freezes used throughout, followed by the action in the water and the tragic premature conclusion of the regatta. It’s good stuff.

Another thing I really enjoyed about this was the music. There was a bunch of funky music throughout the film – it was sometimes suspenseful, it was sometimes jaunty – and it was always fun. I’m not sure why Italy’s movies of the 1970’s and 1980’s has more noticeable music than the United States counterparts, but in my personal view, they do.

Bo Hopkins (Night Shadows, Sweet Sixteen, A Crack in the Floor) was pretty good. I liked his relationship with the whales, and in fact, his little speech to the whales toward the end was pretty emotional. John Huston (The Visitor) was fun, though he doesn’t really have anything to do in the latter portions of the film. Henry Fonda was okay, but his character never got the comeuppance he was due, not by a long shot.

Others, such as Delia Boccardo (A Black Ribbon for Deborah), Claude Akins (The Norliss Tapes, Monster in the Closet, Where Evil Lives, The Curse, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo), and Shelley Winters (Poor Pretty Eddie, The Mad Room, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, The Initiation of Sarah, The Devil’s Daughter) all did decent, but none of them added that much to the movie as a whole.

I think the biggest problem with this, aside from it sometimes being a bit dull, is that the finale, the final battle between the giant octopus and two killer whales, just isn’t that engaging at all. I mean, it’s about five minutes of them fighting underwater (as one can expect) while Hopkins’ character tries to escape the fray and survive. It just wasn’t an interesting finale, and I think it probably could have been done better.

Naturally, this is, in many ways, a rip-off of Jaws, but in typical Jiggy fashion, I do tend to enjoy it more. Partially, as I mentioned in It Came from Beneath the Sea, it’s due to the fact I enjoy octopi, and the octopus here was pretty fun when he popped up.

Even so, I can’t say the movie is great. It’s entertaining at times, but other times it can be a bit of a struggle to sit through, and the fact it’s an hour and 42 minutes doesn’t help matters. Some sequences were really fun, such as the regatta, but overall, I tend to find this around average.

7/10