Tentacles
Tentacoli
Directed by:
Ovidio G. AssonitisCinematography:
Roberto D'Ettorre PiazzoliComposer:
Stelvio CiprianiCast:
John Huston, Shelley Winters, Bo Hopkins, Henry Fonda, Cesare Danova, Claude Akins, Sherry Buchanan, Delia Boccardo, Helena Mäkelä, Marc Fiorini (more)Plots(1)
Something's happening at the once quiet coastal town of Solana Beach. Boats are being destroyed and people are going missing. Veteran newsman Ned Turner (John Huston, celebrated director of Escape to Victory and Annie) thinks it's connected with the construction of an undersea tunnel. Something has been disturbed, something that's out for blood but no-one realises just how dangerous it is: there are worse things in the sea than sharks... With a cast of Hollywood legends like Henry Fonda, Shelley Winters, Claude Akins and Bo Hopkins, Tentacles is a classic seventies monster movie, blending ecological ruminations with sudden shocks. (88 Films)
(more)Reviews (2)
Tentacles is simply a product of film commerce, where the potential represented by a trend must be exploited at all costs. It just didn't work out here, and at times, you feel like you're watching something that's completely directorially mishandled. The long scenes at the docks certainly fail to evoke the calm before the storm, and it's really just boredom that doesn't seem to have much relevance to the film at all.
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Whereas Spielberg dares to kill a little boy in Jaws, Ovidio Assonitis swears and kills an infant outright in the opening scene. I guess that much tells you how self-aware a film Tentacles is. Ovidio must have had some pretty solid leverage on John Huston and Henry Fonda to get them into this Italian mess. Or was cash and whiskey enough? It's hard to say, but the sight of the papier-mâché monster slowly and impossibly lingering on the surface of the sea (to Stelvio Cipriani's comically repetitive score) will haunt my memory for a long time.
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