Tentacoli (1977)

... aka: Der Polyp - Die Bestie mit den Todesarmen (The Polyp – The Beast with Death Arms)
... aka: Dödens tentakler (Death Tentacles)
... aka: Kæmpeblæksprutten (Giant Octopus)
... aka: Tentacles

Directed by:
"Oliver Hellman" (Ovidio G. Assonitis)

In the small coastal town of Solana Beach, California, the annual junior "yacht race" (actually a sailboat race) is just days away when something (read: a giant octopus) starts gobbling up the locals left and right. First on the menu is 10-month-old Baby Billy, who probably didn't stand much of a chance anyway considering his dumb-as-dishwater mother leaves him sitting alone by the water in a stroller while she runs off to gossip with a friend. Next up, a peg-legged fisherman disappears and his mangled corpse later turns up to stop an obese teenage girl from raping her disinterested date on a dock. (I'm not joking.) And then two divers go down to check out the status of some underwater cables and don't come back. They and other corpses are quickly filling up the morgue and all are stripped down to the bone and with all the marrow sucked out. Sheriff Rolands (Claude Akins) is at a loss what to do but he's apparently never seen a monster movie before. One should always check to see what kind of unethical corporation is in the area and what they're up to first and then go from there. In this case, it's a company drilling through the ocean floor with experimental new equipment as they attempt to build an underground tunnel.

The only thing that really separates this poorly-made, by-the-numbers and rather dull killer animal flick from others of its type is its surprisingly upscale cast. John Huston (two-time Oscar winner for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) receives top billing playing former “big city journalist” Ned Turner, who's recently retired to the small, quiet community to work at the local paper and live with his sister, Tillie. Though Huston is rightfully better known as a filmmaker he also wasn't a bad actor, which he proves here by managing to get through the proceeding without embarrassing himself. The same cannot be said for most of his co-stars. His sister Tillie is played by another two-time Oscar winner - Shelley Winters - and while she does kind of embarrass herself (the ten gallon sombrero doesn't help matters) it's in that great Shelley Winters kinda way. She deserves some credit for at least bringing some kind of energy / entertainment value here as she camps it up as an over-the-hill barfly and nagging, overbearing single mom who starts each morning with a Bloody Mary and spends every evening trying to pick up a random stud from the local bar... Or so we hear, we never actually get to see that last part, unfortunately.

The other big name this picture was sold on the back of was Henry Fonda. It's hard to imagine watching Fonda here (he's awful!) that he'd go on to win his own pair of Oscars a few years down the line, but that's exactly what happened. His character, Mr. Whitehead, is the president of Trojan Tunnels Inc.; the company responsible for unleashing the giant octopus in the first place by using high radio frequencies “well beyond the legal limit.” Fonda has minimal screen time in this one because he was still in the process of recovering from a major heart surgery. Supposedly his three brief scenes were all filmed in a single day, which probably explains why they let a flubbed line slide through. Fonda also isn't really the main bad guy as he's oblivious to what's going on with his own company while his second-in-command, John Corey (Cesare Danova) is overseeing the entire project. Danova comes off even worse than Fonda here thanks to being the lucky recipient of a horribly wooden over-dub.

After several corpses are found, Huston's character runs off and recruits Will Gleason (Bo Hopkins), the best “marine expert” in the area. Will's clingy wife Vicky (Delia Boccardo) unsuccessfully tries to talk him out of getting involved but then expresses no opposition to her own sister Judy (Sherry Buchanan) going into dangerous waters on a snorkeling pleasure cruise with two of her male friends, including rotund Italian comedian Franco Diogene. When Judy doesn't come back, Vicky charters a ship (late at night, of course) to look for her and is killed along with the crew when the octopus crashes into and sinks their ship. After the carnivorous calamari turns a children's boat race into an all-you-can-eat buffet, Will and his colleague Mike (Alan Boyd) take two killer whales out to some caves where the monster lurks in hopes of killing it.

Mostly awful acting, terrible dialogue, a bland / entirely rehashed sub-Jaws plot, not nearly enough octopus action, poorly-directed and suspense-free attack scenes and no notable special effects to speak of sink this lame creature feature pretty quickly. The only things bringing it to occasional life are some interesting directorial flourishes, including a long unbroken crane shot that's surprisingly well executed, plus some decent underwater photography. The poorly-edited attack sequence on the kids, which features an astoundingly awkward use of freeze frames, is also memorable... though I'm not sure for the right reasons. Stelvio Cipriani contributed a bizarre score to the proceedings (which was released as a soundtrack album) and the big finale, consisting of two plastic whale dolls ripping apart a (real) dead octopus while our heroes float around and watch, is one of the least exciting endings I've ever seen to one of these films.

I beg to differ!

I bet they made a ton off of this stupid thing! Usually when I'm looking for posters for a particular film I'll find three or four different ones. For this one, I found posters from fifteen different countries and I didn't have to look hard to find them. Most places just used a derivation of the original title Tentacoli, though a few European countries said fuck it and just called it what it really is: Giant Octopus. Someone has submitted some seriously conflicting information for this one over on IMDb so I'd take what they say with a grain of salt. In the budget section for the film, they claim this cost 750 thousand and 5 million dollars (!?) to make. How a film can have two different budgets is beyond me. The trivia section adds: “The production spent nearly $1 million on a life-sized replica of a giant octopus which promptly sank when they put it in the water.” For starters, there is no way in hell this clearly low budget film with barely any real fx spent a million on an octopus model. Second, if they spent a million on a giant octopus the budget certainly couldn't have been 750K. The five million figure doesn't ring true either considering the same year's much more polished and clearly much higher budgeted (yet still kind of crappy) ORCA cost 6 million to make. So either the 750K is true but the part about the octopus model is a lie or the film cost 5 million and 4 million disappeared into the director's bank account.

The PG-rated Tentacles was released theatrically here in the U.S. by AIP and went on to gross three million dollars in America alone. After debuting on NBC TV in 1979, it became a staple late night filler movie on cable throughout the 80s and 90s. It was then well-circulated on VHS by companies like Vestron and Orion. All of the above prints of the film were cut by about 10 minutes but it was almost entirely dialogue scenes that were removed. The first full, uncut and still PG-rated version made its DVD debut courtesy of MGM's Midnite Movies line in 2005, where it was double billed with EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977). Finally (one can hope!), there's a Blu-ray / DVD combo from Shout! / Scream Factory, who've paired it with the Danish monster movie Reptilicus (1961). This is truly one of those titles that you couldn't avoid even if you tried to but probably wish you had after sitting through it.

★1/2

Stridulum (1979)

... aka: Die Außerirdischen (The Aliens)
... aka: El visitante del más allá (Visitor from Beyond)
... aka: Herdeiros da Morte (Death Heirs)
... aka: Piken fra mørket (The Girl from the Darkness)
... aka: Satans lilla flicka (Satan's Little Girl)
... aka: Visitor, The
... aka: Visitors, The

Directed by:
"Michael J. Paradise" (Giulio Paradisi)

A cloaked figure walks across a sand dune against a bright orange sun and a blue and pink sky as clouds of dust begin to fill the screen and birds fly out. Things then cut to a storyteller clad in a beige robe in a white room telling a story to a bunch of bald children. For a second I thought this was at the St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, but nope this is heaven (or a cosmic equivalent) and the man setting up our tale is none other than Jesus Christ (or a cosmic equivalent) himself, who's played by Franco Nero with a brown beard and a long-haired bleach blonde wig (!) He tells us of an evil alien criminal named Sateen, who managed to escape captivity and head to Earth, where he mutated and developed psychic powers, which he then used to cause destruction and death. The alien commander in charge of apprehending him then sent an army of birds to kill him, which they eventually did, but not before Sateen was able to spread his seed to numerous Earth women who went on to bear evil little children. Oh yes, and he also transformed into an eagle at some point but that doesn't have much to do with anything. The following paragraph is just some of the gonzo nonsense the director and writers decided to fill our heads with during the opening seven minutes. We've still got an hour and a half left to go, so brace yourselves.

Down on Earth, we meet filthy rich Raymond Armstead (a young Lance Henriksen), who owns the "Atlanta Rebels" basketball team. Raymond is dating and planning on marrying divorcée Barbara Collins (Joanne Nail) but there's one little thorn in her side: her horrible 8-year-old daughter Katie (Paige Conner). Katie is such an evil, foul-mouthed, creepy and obnoxious child that mom never wants to bear another for fear it'll turn out just like her! Barbara's intuition turns out to be correct as she's carrying the genes of Sateen and any child she has will also be cursed with supernatural abilities. Meanwhile, a secret society led by Dr. Walker (Mel Ferrer) want to make sure she has a son by any means necessary since she's the last descendant of Sateen. In order to hurry along the process, the bad guys sneak a gun into Katie's birthday party so she'll "accidentally" shoot mum in the back; paralyzing her from the waist down. But even that doesn't spark her desire to wed and pop out another kid, so the society must then take drastic measures.

The "visitor" of the title is Jerzy Colsowicz (John Huston), an elderly emissary sent from the heavens to put a stop to the Sateen bloodline. Somehow that involves congregating on a rooftop with a bunch of bald men carrying boxes, watching specks of light in the sky and getting hired on as a babysitter so he can play a game of Pong (!) with little Katie. Glenn Ford shows up long enough to get his eyes pecked out and then blown up in a car after the demon-alien-girl accuses him of being a child molester and tells him to go fuck himself. Shelley Winters plays a housekeeper / amateur astrologist who carries around an "artificial birdhouse" (don't ask) and, in a hilarious scene, loses her cool and starts vigorously shaking and slapping around the little brat. Director Sam Peckinpah rounds out the surprisingly interesting cast in a useless bit as Barbara's ex-husband, an abortion doctor she goes to out of desperation after being kidnapped by men in Hazmat suits who artificially inseminate her against her will.

While this goes many unusual and often unintentionally hilarious places (the ice rink scene and the scene where Katie makes a basketball hoop explode on Kareem Abdul Jabbar must be seen to be believed), at the end of the day it's just another tale of good vs. evil snatching ideas from numerous other, much better horror and sci-fi flicks (most obviously The Omen and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), mixing them up in a blender and saying "Hey, look at us, we're being original!" Though there are some interesting ideas in the screenplay, the dialogue is hilariously awful and I felt a little guilty watching the talented cast spouting their cringe-worthy, insipid lines and going through scenes that make absolutely zero sense. By the end, Henriksen looks so checked out he doesn't even register a facial expression other than bored after getting stabbed in the throat. Some of the others (particularly the ladies) have been coached to overact wildly and the least said about little Conner's performance the better. Cute accent, though.

I won't sit here and pretend like this is a good film because it's not. However, it is entertaining if you get a kick out of overblown, ineptly-directed train wrecks with major star power and I don't regret watching it. Some of the visuals (particularly at the beginning) are quite arresting, but when everything else going on is so poorly done and laughable, a few striking images here and there are hardly enough to compensate. And for the record, I watched the uncut 108 minute version and not the heavily cut 90 minute print and this thing is still a huge mess even with the restored footage. I had no clue what this film's original title Stridulum referred to either, but apparently it means "whizzing or hissing" in Latin. How that relates to the movie itself is another head-scratcher unless it's referring to the sound of birds flying. "Stridulum" certainly sounds cooler than "Flapping," eh?

There are numerous notable releases for this one. Long after a cut 1982 VHS release from Samuel Goldwyn Home Entertainment and a cut 1989 reissue through United American Video, Code Red got the ball rolling on a DVD release that finally came out in 2010 and was the first time the film was seen uncut here in America. Code Red's package comes with interviews with Nail, Conner, U.S. production manager Stratton Leopold and Italian producer Ovidio G. Assonitis (who also wrote the story), two commentary tracks (one with Nail and the other with Conner, plus moderators Scott Spiegel and Jeff Burr), trailers and so forth. In late 2013, the film received a limited - make that, very limited - theatrical reissue through Drafthouse Films, who have since pushed really hard to try to turn this into some kind of cult film. Apparently it's worked on some genre critics going by a sudden burst of glowing reviews that have emerged since then. All of that was basically orchestrated to move a 2014 Blu ray release from (surprise!) Drafthouse Films, that includes brief interviews with Henriksen, cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri and co-writer Luciano Comici. The interviews themselves shine a spotlight directly on why this turned out to be such a mess.

The score from Franco Micalizzi (available on an RCA soundtrack album) fluctuates from hideously inappropriate TV crime show-style theme music to quite otherworldly and beautiful sci-fi synthesizer beats and is just as schizophrenic and uneven as the rest of the movie. How it's applied to the film itself, however, is mostly a debit. Overuse of thundering and overbearing cues to amateurishly signal whenever something's supposed to be odd or scary becomes almost comical after awhile. Budgeted at around 800,000 dollars (money was chipped in from Samuel Z. Arkoff, Samuel Goldwyn Jr. and others), the majority of shooting took place in Atlanta, Georgia with some interiors done in Italy.

SBIG