Tentacles

ITA 1977
Director: Ovidio G. Assonitis
Cast: John Huston, Shelly Winters, Bo Hopkins, Henry Fonda

92 Min. | OmU | Original with german Subtitles

Retrospektive

In 1975, a great white shark terrorized vacationers in Steven Spielberg‘s »Jaws« and also exposed a school of thinking that puts profit before everything else. In Ovidio G. Assonitis »Tentacles«, which was shot two years later, a giant octopus terrorizes a small Californian beach resort. More than the shark, Assonitis’ creature is a monster of capitalism, the spawn of a company‘s greed and recklessness in the service of maximum profit. The adjustment towards the eco-horror of the 1970s gives Assonitis‘ otherwise wonderfully straight forward variation of the back in the days very popular creature-features an impressive actuality, as the hero of this wacky spectacle is not the marine biologist (played by Bo Hopkins as a truly bizarre heavy that only the Italian cinema of the time could create), but the aging journalist Ned Turner. An obstinate, undeviating fighter for truth, played with his own grandiosity by the great John Huston. His scenes alone make the film unforgettable at a time when men like Turner would not only have to fight the rich and powerful, but also the disintegrative fake news culture.