Tentacles: Oliver Hellman

As far as Jaws-clones go, Oliver Hellman's Tentacles is actually one of the best. The idea of a giant murdering octopus is indeed a frightening one. And to the film's credit, it wisely decides to not show the eponymous monstrosity until late in the story. John Huston is delightful as Ned Turner, the newspaperman who first suspects that a rash of dock-side killings might be related. Additionally, the film has the distinction of being a true wide-screen film instead of merely a film that is shot in that format. An early scene where a baby carriage disappears behind a moving bus is particularly ingenious in its use of widescreen framing and composition. But the film does have several inescapable problems. The climax where two killer whales do battle with the octopus is too murky and dark for it to be properly effective. And it's easy to spot that the film was made by Italians who didn't have the best grasp of the English language. A couple of the characters are burdened with truly bizarre lines that might have worked in Italian but seemed forced an artificial in English. For example, there are two young boys who are attacked by the octopus during a boat race. They talk like children twice their age and use inflections that recall the strained, falsetto voice-overs frequently given to young characters in Italian exploitation films. Also, Henry Fonda is wasted as a local captain of industry who discovers his company might be responsible for the octopus attacks. He moves and speaks like a robot, almost as if the director forced him to recite his awkwardly translated lines verbatim. Such a pity...

6/10