All Rise...

Judge Patrick Naugle has his tentacles in a bunch.

The Charge

Just when you thought it was safe to back into nature!

The Case

Welcome to mother nature at her worst! In 1977's Tentacles, the tourist resort town of Ocean Beach is plunged into chaos when a mammoth, blood-thirsty octopus starts using the local shoreline as its own personal Golden Corral buffet. A journalist (John Huston, Chinatown) and a marine expert (Bo Hopkins, American Graffiti) start digging and find the culprit to possibly be an underwater tunnel built by the Trojan company, run by Mr. Whitehead (Henry Fonda, On Golden Pond)! In 1961's Reptilicus some miners inadvertently dig up a part of a monster reptile's tail from their site in Lapland. The piece of flesh is transported to a Danish Aquarium in Copenhagen and frozen to be further studied. However—as is often the case in movies like this—someone screws up and the piece of lizard tail thaws out and regenerates, becoming a giant hulking dragon known as Reptilicus, who goes on a mad rampage through Copenhagen, and it's up to a band of flustered scientists to come up with a way to save the countryside from becoming the lizard's lunch!

A Danish-American production, Reptilicus is what would happen if someone tried to make a Godzilla movie on the shoestring budget of a community college theatrical production. This early 1960s production seems to take forever to get to the stuff everyone came to see—Monsters! Mayhem! Destruction!—and even when the titular beast appears, it's a let down of epic proportions. It's hard to understand how Reptilicus survived into 2015 except as a cautionary tale of how bad movies can be even worse.

The actors in Reptilicus are mostly foreign faces, none of which will be familiar to American audiences. Rumor has it that when the film was finished most of the actors were re-dubbed by other American actors, which is not surprising considering how stiff and odd the performances are. Everyone sounds as if they're just a tick off, their lips not always lining up with the dialogue. My favorite character—and I'm using the term "character" loosely—was the night watchman named Peterson, played by Dirch Passer (who's best films including such classics as The Lustful Vicar and 1001 Danish Delights). Passer spends his time on screen screaming, bugging his eyes out, and sticking his hand into aquariums clearly marked "electric eels." Whatever the definition is of "comic relief," Passer was the complete opposite.

I suppose it will come as no surprise to find out the special effects in Reptilicus aren't just bad but exceptionally bad; the Reptilicus monster appears to have been made out of whatever the effects crew could find laying around their lab. Cheap plastic, shoddy painting, rubber teeth, and laughably bad sound effects only confirm that viewers will practically laugh themselves to death when the creature arrives on screen. When the creature attacked a local bridge it was like watching a puppet parody of a monster movie. Yup…it's that bad.

On one hand, Reptilicus a truly terrible movie that is inept from frame one and doesn't let up on the stupid until the credits finally roll. On the other hand, if you're a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan, you'll find a lot to love in this movie—it truly cries out to be mocked by a space jockey and two smart ass robots. The only way I can recommend a movie like Reptilicus is if you have lots of libations in your refrigerator.

Then there's Tentacles, a movie that I could already tell was going to be one big steaming pile of ridiculous once the name of producer Samuel Z. Arkoff came up on the screen. The film was an Italian-American production meant to cash in on Steven Spielberg's Jaws (released two years earlier). Like Joe Dante's Piranha and Michael Anderson's Orca, Tentacles rides the coat tails of Jaws but to much less success. In fact, by comparison, Piranha and Orca look like masterpieces when compared to the lackluster Tentacles.

It's hard to say what's worse in Tentacles: the monster or Shelly Winters' hair. I think it's a toss up. In what must be some kind of freakish cosmic anomaly, Tentacles features not one, not two, but THREE big name Hollywood stars (at least for 1977): Shelly Winters, Henry Fonda, and John Huston. All three of those actors are legends who have starred in some of the best offerings cinema has to offer. What they are doing in a film like Tentacles is anyone's guess (although if I was a betting man, I'd say "free vacation" and "large paycheck"). At one point in the film, Shelly Winters shows up in a sombrero that is almost the size of small UFO and I swear to God it's one of the funniest things I've seen in a decade. For a movie trying hard to scare the viewer, it doesn't do a very good job when it suddenly looks like an outdated commercial for Taco Bell. I guess we should just be thankful Winters wasn't carrying a Chihuahua.

As directed by Oliver Hellman (Beyond the Door), Tentacles is about as exciting as Jaws, if you replaced the shark with a rubber barracuda and a film score comprised almost sorely of disco music. The monster—an eight legged monstrosity or rubber-iffic proportions—would have been better left on the sea floor. A giant squid? Terrifying. A giant octopus? All that does is make me hungry for calamari. Everything that Steven Spielberg did right in Jaws by hiding his creature is undone in a film like Tentacles. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be confused. But mostly confused.

Tentacles is presented in 2.35:1 widescreen while Reptilicus is presented in 1.66:1 widescreen, both in 1080p high definition. Neither of these transfer are going to blow away viewers. Reptilicus sports a heavy amount of dirt and grain at times and the image is never as sharp as one might expect on Blu-ray. Considering Scream Factory's track record, I have the feeling this is due to the source elements, not the studio's efforts. Tentacles is presented in DTS-HD 2.0Master Audio while Reptilicus is presented in DTS-HD 1.0 Master Audio, both in English. The soundtracks for these films are different but sort of the same—both films feature front heavy music scores, dialogue, and effects while hardly any of the surround speakers are employed. Also included on this disc are English subtitles for each film.

Bonus features include theatrical trailers for both films.

Tentacles and Reptilicus are bottom-of-the-barrel B-movies which have been given far better Scream Factory treatment than they deserve.

The Verdict

Meh.

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