Following the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975), various exploitation ventures tried to cash in with lookalike flicks of carnivorous sea beasts (occasional land ones) amok. Spielberg himself gave his approval to one, Joe Dante's tongue-in-cheek Piranha. Nobody much gave any approval to Ovidio G. Assonitis' Tentacles, but here is the theatrically released Italian-American B-picture anyhow, in a Blu-ray re-release. Enjoy nostalgic memories, if you can.
A Los Angeles-area coastal community suffers mystery deaths and disappearances by the water (one of the first is the eeriest, a baby gone from a stroller, a tipoff that this monster means business). A dogged veteran reporter (John Huston) digs into the matter, spurring local authorities. The viewer learns early on that the culprit is a bloodthirsty giant (roaring!) octopus, whose existence and bad attitude has to do with underwater drilling and "experiments" undertaken by a cranky old industrialist (Henry Fonda).
After too many octo-cides, a folksy orca researcher (Bo Hopkins) embarks, Ahab-like, after the slimy beast. It is film lore 101 that much of the suspenseful magic Spielberg conjured in Jaws arose of necessity - the big robot shark built for Universal Pictures's adaptation of the Peter Benchley bestseller just didn't function too well, forcing the director to manipulate mood and suggestion.
Assonitis just tries anything: mismatched shots of an aquarium octopus, a decent-looking animation octopus, a lifeless and fake-looking prop octopus, octo-POV shots, woeful miniatures, etc. We would like to report for My Octopus Teacher fans that no live animals were harmed in the making of this...but it really looks as though they were. Bad enough if the cephalopods and orcas had to listen to the cheap synth soundtrack music (recycled from a 1973 Italian crime thriller).
As for the hapless humans, cineastes will note Hollywood greats such as Huston, Fonda, Shelley Winters, Claude Akins, etc. picking up checks for their roles. Huston and Winters do give the banal script a sporting try; they would reunite under Assonitis (producing this time) for the 1980s film The Visitor, an occult/religious thriller noted by movie cultists for weirdness. Tentacles, meanwhile, looks like a workaday 1970s TV movie, with minimal profanity and one quick shock cut of a gory corpse to achieve a PG rating.
Some mainstream-collections buyers may be grateful for the relative inoffensiveness of Tentacles compared to T&A and gore of what has come to be known as "sharksploitation," but that's it. Except for the original trailer, the Blu-ray has little extra to offer. Not recommended for public library film collections.