Roses Have Thoughts

There’s a point, when revisiting 1970s exploitation cinema, where you eventually abandon all hope of slick narrative logic and instead revel in the brazen audacity of the enterprise. Tentacles (1977), directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis, is a case in point. Riding the post-Jaws wave of aquatic monster movies, this Italian-American co-production promised a leviathan of terror but often delivers a bloated curiosity that’s as fascinatingly daft as it is sporadically effective.

Let’s be clear: the premise is pure cash-in. Instead of a killer shark, we’ve got a supersized octopus. Instead of Steven Spielberg’s taut suspense, we have John Huston grimacing through lines about “mutations” caused by corporate malfeasance. And yet, despite all this—or perhaps because of it—the film occupies that weird space between genuine suspense and unintentional camp, which makes it a darn sight better than other Killer Animal Exploitation movies that came out post Jaws, such as the boring Frogs (1972), Orca (1977) and on par with Grizzly (1976).

The cast list is frankly bonkers. You’ve got Oscar-winner Henry Fonda phoning in boardroom scenes so perfunctory they feel beamed in from another movie. Shelley Winters is on delicious form as the dotty mother hen, breezing about with a sort of theatrical excess that feels lifted from a community pantomime, and John Huston—yes, the John Huston—delivers his dialogue like a man who’s just remembered the mortgage is due. And then there’s Bo Hopkins, who ends up giving the most sincere performance in the entire film, largely because he spends much of his screen time monologuing earnestly to his pet killer whales. Yes, really.

So, is Tentacles actually scary? Not really. The special effects range from oddly charming (miniature boats, blurry underwater photography) to outright laughable (rubber tentacles nudging toy models). But every now and then, Assonitis captures a strangely unsettling moment—the sound design in the underwater attacks has an otherworldly eeriness, and the sheer size of the creature glimpsed in silhouette does briefly evoke awe. The problem is pacing: long stretches of tedium are punctuated by bursts of sea-creature mayhem that never quite live up to the lurid poster art.

Where Tentacles earns its cult appeal is in its weird tonal seesaw. One moment you’re watching small-town melodrama with Huston furrowing his brow; the next, you’re plunged into an attack sequence scored not with John Williams-style grandeur but Bruno Nicolai’s slightly wonky music cues. The climactic battle, involving trained killer whales taking on the octopus, is so ridiculous it achieves a sort of trash transcendence.

In the end, Tentacles is less a horror classic than a curio—a prime slice of 1970s eco-exploitation cinema, as much a time capsule as a piece of entertainment. It’s clumsy, yes, but also oddly endearing, its failures wrapped in a sincerity that makes it hard to dismiss.

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