Monster movies — especially giant monster movies — are not created equal. There are some great ones, which are rightfully considered to be classics. Everything else tends to fall into different categories of bad, from the schlocky but entertaining to the truly cheap and dismal. Two giant monster movies that land closer to the latter end of the spectrum have been packaged together on a new Blu-ray from Scream Factory that seems specially designed for lovers of Z-grade horror.
First up is the 1977 film Tentacles, a cross between a blatant Jaws rip-off and a standard ’70s disaster movie. It tells the story (if you can call it that) of Ocean Beach, a resort town experiencing a series of attacks by a giant octopus. It seems a construction company headed by Henry Fonda (slumming) is building an underwater tunnel and using radio frequencies that are making the octopus unusually aggressive. The only residents who suspect what’s going on are an intrepid reporter played by John Huston (slumming) and a marine biologist played by Bo Hopkins (slumming, but just barely).
The biggest drawback to Tentacles is that it is almost criminally dull. Yes, it rips off Jaws in its concept — beach town attacked by enormous aquatic creature — and in the beats of its plot, but it fails to replicate any of the suspense, thrills or technical mastery of Spielberg’s landmark film. Director Ovidio Assonitis can’t ever settle on a tone for the movie, which sometimes wants to be scary and nail-bitingly tense and sometimes is silly and campy, made no less so by the bouncy, dated disco score by Stelvio Cipriani. Shelly Winters, cast here as Huston’s sister whose young son has a run-in with the eight-legged monster, pitches her performance at her usual volume and size. She’s cartoonishly over the top, even in scenes during which we are meant to be in suspense.
True to the film it blatantly copies, Tentacles avoids showing its titular creature for most of its running time. Unfortunately, even when director Assonitis shows the octopus, he still barely shows it — there’s little more than the top of a head poking out of the water. The effect is more silly than scary, but that’s true of most of Tentacles. It isn’t until late in the film, when Bo Hopkins has a long talk with his Orca whales (that’s right) and tells them he wants them to help him kill the octopus, that the movie finally feels like it is fully embracing its own lunatic campiness and becoming a movie that’s more parody of Jaws than imitation. Alas, Joe Dante’s Piranha already exists. Even on this level, Tentacles is basically irrelevant.
Even sillier is the second feature on the disc, 1962’s Reptilicus, a film about a giant reptile with regenerative abilities attacking Copenhagen. Yes, this is perhaps the only giant monster movie to ever come out of Denmark.
The story behind Reptilicus is infinitely more interesting than the finished film. Like Universal’s Dracula in 1931, two versions of the film were shot concurrently: one in English and one in Danish. The American cut of the film — which adds most of the movie’s cheap-looking animated effects — was held back for months while it was fixed by AIP. The American version included on Scream Factory’s new Blu-ray features Danish actors performing their dialogue in English that have then been dubbed by American actors. Director/writer/producer Sidney Pink filed a lawsuit against the studio — some say in regards to the redubbed voices — but reportedly dropped it after seeing the film. This is a movie that made almost no one happy.
In its way, Reptilicus is at least more entertaining than Tentacles, as it’s the kind of bad movie that lacks only three silhouettes mocking it from the bottom-right corner of the frame. The regular signifiers of giant monster movies are present and accounted for: prehistoric creature discovered by digging, military presence, scientists explaining how the monster works, destructive attacks on populated cities. But then there are bizarre touches, like the tone deaf humor of a Stanley Spadowski-like janitor character named Peterson (Dirch Passer), whose every second of onscreen stoogedom disrupts what is meant to be a “serious” monster movie. Apparently, Peterson was at the center of a full-blown musical number in the Danish cut of the film. Now that I would like to see. If you’re going to make a bad movie, might as well go all in with the badness.
Unfortunately, the Danish cut has not been included on Scream Factory’s Blu-ray. While the movie is over 50 years old and was made on the cheap to begin with, it looks decent in high-def. Presented in its original 1.66:1 widescreen, the newly remastered transfer offers pretty good color and holds up well in all, but the “effects” shots of the giant lizard are beat up and scratched quite a bit. Tentacles looks even better, with a 2.35:1 widescreen transfer that shows very little age. The DTS HD stereo sound mix is better on Tentacles than the mono track on Reptilicus, probably because more money was spent on the sound design to begin with. The only extras included for both titles are their trailers, some radio spots and still galleries for each.
This is something of a strange release for Scream Factory; while I’m sure there’s a handful of fans for these films — particularly aficionados of “bad” cinema — it feels more like a curiosity than their usual output. This is the rare Scream Factory title that I’m comfortable saying it’s ok to skip.
Tentacles Score: 2/5
Reptilicus Score: 1.5/5
Disc Score: 2/5
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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