Incredible Petrified World, The (1959)

... aka: El mundo increíble (The Amazing World)
... aka: Le monde pétrifié (The Petrified World)

Directed by:
Jerry Warren

Like any other low budget 50s horror / sci-fi flick worth its grain in schlock, this opens with five minutes of narrated stock footage. We see the roaring ocean, an octopus and shark fighting and then a bunch of regular ole fish doing their thing. "We are now prepared to invade this black wilderness," says the monotone voice-over. Well, I was actually already prepared five minutes ago but thanks for your concern. After a few men at a private screening discuss the money and time sunk into ocean exploration, we're whisked off to somewhere in the Caribbean where Professor Millard Wyman (John Carradine) is preparing to test out his new diving bell, which should instead be renamed a "diving ball" because of its completely circular shape. Because both his peers and investors alike had no faith in what he was trying to accomplish, Wyman was forced to finance this project all on his own. Meaning, his reputation and pocketbook are both about to take a big hit.

Wyman's aluminum beach ball is slated to go "deeper than any man has ever gone before" so that a small group of explorers can see what exists "thousands of feet" below the surface. Since Wyman is already up there in age, he enlists four others to take the plunge in his place. There's ambitious, catty and cone-bra'd "lady reporter" Dale Marshall (Phyllis Coats), who's just received a Dear Joan letter from her estranged husband, oceanographers Paul Whitmore (Allen Windsor) and Lauri Talbott (Sheila Noonan), both former students of Wyman's, and scientist Craig Randall (Robert Clarke), the newest addition to their research team. Everyone is high in spirit and enthusiasm as the flimsy tin death trap is lowered into the water, but those good times won't be lasting much longer for our four-person crew.

Once they are 1700 feet below the surface, there's a glitch in the electricity, radio contact is lost and the cable lowering the contraption snaps, dropping the bell deep into the recesses of the unknown. Professor Wyman tries to stave off the obligatory bad press while fellow scientist J.R. Matheny (George Skaff), who's planning his own rival diving bell expedition with a different model designed by Professor Wyman's brother, Jim (Joe Maierhauser), keep tabs on what's going on and put their own planned underwater expedition on indefinite hiatus. Meanwhile, the crew, who passed out during the fall, finally awaken on what they first assume is the ocean floor. After a hysterical Dale has to be slapped back into reality, the group soon realize they're actually somewhere else entirely. They can see light through their porthole, which wouldn't be the case had they floated all the way down. And, well, they're still alive when they should be dead from the pressure increase.

The team throw on their diving gear and air tanks and head out to see where the light is coming from. They end up in an elaborate cave system, filled with countless tunnels illuminated by phosphorous. Pools of potable water are around and there's plenty of access to fresh seafood so at least their basic needs are met while they wait for help. Back on the main ship, Carradine and company have resigned themselves to the fate of their friends and are only hanging around nearby to potentially retrieve their corpses from the water. Radio operator Wilson (Lloyd Nelson) picks up what he believes to be the missing party on his sonar but his observations are all but ignored. Instead, Wyman discovers why his diving bell didn't work properly and goes to Matheny about possibly making adjustments to his diving bell so he can make a second attempt at underwater exploration.

By now, the four lost explorers have given up hope they'll be rescued. They use up most of their oxygen tanks making trips back to the diving bell to retrieve whatever may be useful for their long life living in the caves. They stumble across a big lizard, a human skeleton and, finally, a delirious, bug-eyed old man (Maurice Bernard) in a terrible wig and fake beard who claims to have been trapped down there for fourteen long years. As for why there's breathable air and clean water all the way down there, it's because they're situated somewhere underneath a movie volcano that only decides to become active when it's convenient for the plot. None of the new information raises morale or hope they'll ever make it back to the surface. With miles and miles of caves that are incredibly easy to get lost in, how will they ever be able to navigate themselves out of there?

This is actually pretty good for a Jerry Warren film which means it's still pretty bad but could have been a whole lot worse. The poster writes a check ("Terror!" / "Monsters!") the film can't cash and the science elements are dated and ridiculous as is usually the case for this era, but the premise itself I quite liked. However, the budget isn't there to do much with it and there's not nearly enough plot to sustain things. In lieu of that, we get lots of talking and wandering around plus lots of cuts back to the surface where more people sit around talking. As far as drama and tension are concerned, the Dale character acts a bit bitchy at times, Craig and Lauri reveal their love for one another and the voyeuristic caveman falls for Dale and hopes she'll agree to his plan to kill off the others so they can have the cave all to themselves.

Despite the cheapness of the production, they filmed the underground scenes at Colossal Caves in Tucson, Arizona so at least those "sets" are convincing. There's also something unexpectedly lovely and (accidentally) poetic about the long diving scenes thanks to overbearing overhead lighting, bubbles and reflective surfaces mixed with ethereal stock music and the grainy black-and-white photography.

Brianne Murphy, Warren's wife at the time and co-owner of their company GBM Productions, was the production supervisor (as "G.B. Murphy") and dialogue director. She and Warren can also be spotted riding an airplane with Carradine. This was filmed in 1957 but not released until a few years later on a double with Warren's awful TEENAGE ZOMBIES. The budget is said to be a paltry 15,000 dollars (!), with 2K of that going to Carradine for two day's work and another chunk of it spent on making a rubber monster suit that they ended up not even using! The full running time is 66 minutes and the film is in the public domain so it's been released by a whole slew of labels on both VHS and DVD over the years.

★1/2

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