Shark...giant octopus... Who'll know the difference?
When
JAWS opened in 1975 to unprecedented worldwide box office success,
arguably becoming the first summer blockbuster in the process, a deluge
of international copycats was inevitable, and of course Italy, perhaps
the world leader in cinematic ripoffs (slightly edging out Turkey and
Japan), contributed a few notable and utterly shameless examples, with
GREAT WHITE, aka THE LAST SHARK (1980), getting my vote as the most
hilariously brazen of the first wave JAWS clones, but arriving two years
after Spielberg's landmark was this stultifyingly dull cinematic
sedative.
As
expected, TENTACLES takes the basic JAWS template, swaps out a Great
White shark for an humongous cephalopod, and mayhem and gory deaths do
not ensue. What we get instead are a number of victims disappearing with
little or no visceral action, and the few times we see a full-scale
animatronic of the colossal sea monster, it's in the dark and barely
visible, basically because the puppet, much like Spielberg's mechanical
shark infamously did during filming, sank.
One of the film's few shots where you get anything even close to a good look at the monster.
To
remedy this, the filmmakers instead resorted to using a living octopus
that they shot from closeup, which at no point works to make the
creature look monstrously massive. Instead it looks like footage from a
cheap 16mm reel that one might be forced to sit through in a junior high
school biology class. Oh, and the octopus is defeated at the end by a
pair of highly trained orcas, but it's too little too late. Meanwhile, the moviegoing audience has found itself lulled into a torpor.
TENTACLES
also features several American actors, some of impressive pedigree, and
utterly squanders them. We get Shelley Winters, Claude Akins, John
Huston, Bo Hopkins, and Henry Fonda (who was only available for one day
of shooting because he was recovering from recently having a pacemaker
installed), and at no point will you care about any of their characters.
Each pretty much sleepwalks through their roles, to vary degrees, and
by the time the film reaches its overdue climax, it's more than clear
that this was just a paycheck for the Americans who were involved.
Bottom
line: If you must watch a JAWS ripoff, I recommend THE LAST SHARK
instead. Sure, it has its dull patches, but it sports a ludicrous giant
animatronic shark and some hilarious kills. With TENTACLES you get
bubkes.
Poster for the American theatrical release. The poster is more scarier and more exciting than anything found in the actual film.
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