Movie Review: Tentacles (1977)
Synopsis: An ultrasonic underwater drilling operation disturbs a giant octopus that then takes its anger out on citizens from a seaside California resort town. As the body count increases, an ocean biologist attempts to fight the threat using the two orcas he cares for at the aquarium.
Who's in it? The movie stars John Huston, Shelley Winters, Bo Hopkins, Henry Fonda and Delia Boccardo.
Review: My wife and I decided we were too tired, and it was too cold to go out for karaoke last night. So, we decided to stay home and watch a movie instead. I picked Tentacles because I thought it would be interesting or at least entertaining. It ended up being neither of those things.
I'll start out by saying the practical effects weren't bad. The movie made good use of a real octopus and the fake large tentacles, enough where I'd even say it was more believable than some modern CGI films I've seen. Also, the premise was at least somewhat believable, explaining the sonic noise from the drill was making the octopus act aggressively.
The biggest problem with this movie is everything is so drawn out. This includes everything from the underwater scenes that seemed to go on forever to the various unnecessary scenes, like the scene showing the town set up a bunch of yachts for a race (that one made me turn the movie off last night, we ended up finishing it this afternoon).
The movie also has way too many characters in it. I almost felt as though they should be wearing jerseys, and I should have had a roster list because it was difficult keeping track of who was who. It also didn't help that some of the characters, like Tillie (Winters), didn't seem to have any real purpose other than to provide filler.
In fact, I honestly believe you could have eliminated all of that, cut the movie's runtime in half and not had any impact on the overall plot.
Also not helping this movie was the whole "let's use the orcas to fight the octopus" thing. I could have probably bought that as a last-second Hail Mary attempt after everything else failed but there were zero other attempts to stop the octopus prior to that. It was such a ridiculous idea, especially as plan A, it only made an already bad movie worse.
Final Opinion: Monster movies like this don't need much to be watchable. The filmmakers attempted to do too much this time around and the movie suffered as a result.
My Grade: F
Here are some reviews of other movies from 1977:
Movie Review: Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)
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