GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Caryl It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Idiot-Deluxe After watching "Tentacles" last night - and being absolutely miserable as a result of it, there's one fact that's more resoundingly obvious than ever, which is the irrefutable fact that JAWS sure did "inspire" a tidal wave of sea-beast themed movies - and from what I've seen virtually all of them are terrible movies (lame cash-ins). But yet some still manage to be pretty entertaining, however with Tentacles, that's not at all the case......Firstly lets start with a quick cast run-down: Peter Fonda, John Huston, Shelley Winters and Bo Hopkins, so the casting is actually quite good and it was filmed on location off the beautiful coastlines of southern California, but once it's all said and done who really cares, because when movies are this exquisitely boring there's little in the way of positivity to mention. Tentacles is so completely and utterly lame it's hard to know where to start but here goes, the films all-star cast is used ineffectively (particularly in the second half) and Bo Hopkins delivers a lame and listless performance and just listen to his dialog. Terrible writing, terrible delivery, period. The films plot and basic story-line is poorly thought out and ill-conceived and from a special effects stand-point it's clearly obvious that the film simply didn't have anything near good enough to Stop Hearts or Wet Pants. Nope not all, nothing like what you see in say "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" - 22 years earlier. No "effects-wizardry" to see here, just some crudely conceived, low-budget, under-water effects that have been spliced together and intercut with some live animal footage (once again taking notes out of JAWS' playbook); and on that note let it be known that simply showing an animal up-close does not, repeat, does not effectively project any grand sense of scale or "giant" size, nor does it fool the audience - not for a second. I think it's "The Night of the Lepus" that best illustrates that fact, which technically speaking is an even worse movie than Tentacles, but yet at the same time it's much more entertaining, if not entirely for the right reasons. Oh yeah, just to mention it, this film has a soundtrack that's utterly generic, sounds like stock film music to me; my guess is that they could hardly afford John Williams, in any case the films music sucks. If there's one aspect that Tentacles isn't completely incompetent in, it would have to be in terms of its cinematography, apart from a few questionable camera angles its photography is solid throughout.Let me end my rant and review with this warning: For those who were considering wasting their time watching this pathetic garbage-pile of a movie (which is literally nothing more than an ultra-lame cash-in that's playing off of JAWS' record-breaking success), I'd recommend that you watch something else, as Tentacles scores in the bottom 1% of all movies. Lets be brutally honest it offers absolutely nothing that's good.

Jim Mullen Tate (TheFearmakers) The haunting techno keyboard riff by one of Quentin Tarantino's long list of sampled bits of soundtrack, Stelvio Cipriani, opens the 1977 Italian made JAWS exploitation, TENTACLES, on an ominous level that deserves more praise and appreciation to the overall underrated motion picture it envelopes...With creative camera angles, including a ghost boat being towed in to bay while onlookers both move forward and recede slowly from a reverse crane shot, director Ovidio G. Assonitis, who'd produce THE VISITOR two years later and with a list of cult b-flicks under his belt, works stealthily alongside his stock composer to, like the 1975 Steven Spielberg shark summer blockbuster, not spoil the killer octopus all at once, maintaining slowburn suspense in an Alfred Hitchcock fashion...While the acting isn't as good as the overall visual, including underwater shots that look nice but tend to obstruct the body count storyline, and anticipating a boat race regalia for an inevitable mid-peak, the actors are, well... on paper, pretty darn great. And yet, John Huston, Shelley Winters (both in THE VISITOR) and Henry Fonda don't have much to do: The first plays a snoopy journalist while the other's young son prepares for that forbiddingly formidable race (Fonda literally phones in his performance) as Claude Akins's stalwart Sheriff wanders around looking for answers. But it's the always supercool and dependable Bo Hopkins... working at at an oceanic theme park with two trusty killer whales and a gorgeous girlfriend (Delia Boccardo, who could be Heather Graham's aunt, aesthetically) seems to good to be true, or to last... who is the true main character here....A cross between Robert Shaw's hunter Quint but with the friendly countenance of Richard Dreyfuss, Bo seems more the "ringer" than even the veterans. The only downfall is how much time's spent on, like in JAWS, an adventurous third act in which this Hooper-Quint hybrid takes way too long in the open sea to finish off — along with the endearing Orca duo (who both thankfully survive!) — the eight-armed monster for good. The music becomes more of a typical gallant symphony than the previous mid-tempo dirge, which had supplied the best TENTACLES had to offer with... like in most horror flicks... the (in this case fairly long and entertaining) metronomic buildup. (CultFilmFreaks.com)

gavin6942 A mutated giant octopus wreaks havoc on a California seaside community.Although the film was intended to cash in on the success of "Jaws", "Tentacles" also bears numerous resemblances to the 1955 science fiction horror film "It Came from Beneath the Sea". The "Jaws" connection is clear, with the popular seaside community during a certain patriotic festival. But there is that added factor of corporate wrongdoing.The film's score was done by Italian composer Stelvio Cipriani, who scored the similarly Jaws-inspired films "The Great Alligator" and "Piranha II: The Spawning" around the same time. Cipriani's score is one of the most memorable parts of the film, along with Shelley Winters' hats. What is up with her sombrero? The acting is choppy, with only the big name actors even trying, making them seem out of place when compared to everyone else.

JoeB131 There was once this little movie, you might have heard of called "Jaws", about a shark that terrorized a little town in New England. It made a bunch of money and got a bunch of hack movie makers thinking, "How can we rip this off? What else in nature scares us?" So Dino DeLaurentis did something with a killer whale, and Roger Corman did something with piranhas, and Samuel Arkoff did this thing with a giant octopus. And he got some good actors to star in it, but it was clear they realized they were nowhere near quality and just phoned it in.So this beach community in Los Angeles (which seems to have an inordinate amount of people with Italian accents, for some reason) is under attack by a giant octopus that is attracted to radios. The first victim is a baby. (Oh, if you have to kill kids to make your horror work, you're a hack!) We have a bunch of shots of a real octopus with miniatures and some day-players dying of bad editing.Then you have this meaningless ending where they sic a couple of killer whales on the giant octopus...The movie is never clear on who the protagonists are. I'm not even sure the writers knew. The whole subplot with John Huston and Henry Fonda almost seems tacked on.