**Potential Spoilers**
Another movie, another review and yet another movie that tried to piggy back on the success of Jaws. Whilst Jaws had a great white shark Tentacles has a large angry Octopus. The fact that this movie appears to have been "inspired" by Jaws is not a reason to dislike it, for example: Piranha (1978) is a decent horror movie in my opinion. The movie Tentacles on the other hand, is just plain awful, and that is a much better reason to dislike it.
The plot of Tentacles is a simple one: large Octopus is aggravated by radio waves and kills people. Right from the beginning the killing starts as one of the worlds worst mothers abandons her child at the side of the ocean in order to go talk to her friend across the street. Pretty soon bodies begin to be discovered, all of them have had their flesh stripped to the bone, even the bone marrow has been removed. Step forth the seasoned journalist Ned Turner and marine expect Will Gleason. Between the two of them they must figure out what is killing people, and somehow stop it. That really is it, the plot is that simple, that is not to say that the movie does not have other elements, it does, but none of them seem relevant to the plot. For example, Ned Turner lives with his sister, his sister has a lot of failed marriages and wears ridiculous hats. Also, there is something about a company drilling in the ocean, perhaps they upset the octopus, who knows, I sort of drifted off trying to watch the 1hr 40 minutes of mind numbing boredom.
On a technical level this movie is awful. Despite having a cast that included John Huston and Henry Fonda the acting is generally speaking awful.The supporting cast are dreadful, none of them are believable, particularly Ned's sister or her child. The movie is in some scenes not in sync. Not that it really matters as the dialogue is so stilted and unnatural you will probably not even notice it. The special effects were not as bad as I thought they would be, but in some instances they are far from convincing. For example, in one scene the octopus sinks a boat and it is blantanly obvious it is a model and not a particularly good one at that. Then there is the movie soundtrack, harpsichord, every time there is about to be some sort of octopus encounter, harpsichord. Harpsichord, why would anyone want to have harpsichord in a horror movie? Lastly the pacing of the movie is so uncessarily slow with some scenes lasting far, far longer than they needed to. Without these filler scenes the movie would have been a lot shorter, speaking of which this movie is 1h 40 minutes worth and it feel like a lot, lot longer as you watch the underwater scenes play out. The ending of the movie was so corny, so awful, words fail me.
1 out of 10
Summary: too long, bad acting, poor dialogue and poor acting too. Not even bad enough to be funny, although there are a couple of chuckle worthy scenes. Avoid.