Tentacles

Tentacles (1977)

Tentacoli

It's Turning the Beach ... Into a Buffet!

Several people disappear from and at the sea. Their bodies are found gnawed to the skeleton, even the marrow is missing. The scientists have no idea which animal could do such things. Dr. Turner begins to suspect that the company which builds a tunnel beneath the bay might have poisoned the environment and caused an octopus to mutate to giant dimensions...

Date of release
1977-02-25
TMDB
4.6 / 10 (123)
Runtime
1h 42m
Genres
Horror, Science Fiction, Adventure, Action
Director
Ovidio G. Assonitis

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: San Diego

Tentacles is a 1977 horror-thriller film directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis and starring John Huston, Shelley Winters, Bo Hopkins, Cesare Danova, Delia Boccardo and Henry Fonda.

Production

Tentacles was produced to capitalize on the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, and as such was produced on a much smaller budget of $750,000.

The initial script was much more comedic and satirized the "killer animal" subgenre, but after executive producer Samuel Z. Arkoff had his writer Steven W. Carabatsos retool it, it became much more serious.

The lead actors were American, while the supporting cast was mostly Italian. Ovidio G. Assonitis' first choice to play the lead role Ned Turner was John Wayne. Wayne accepted the role, but after Assonitis met him at his home in Texas, he realized the actor was far too ill to play the part (Wayne would ultimately die of cancer in June 1979).

Assonitis turned to Henry Fonda, who had recently appeared in a string of Italian productions. However, the actor suffered a heart attack shortly before filming. Since Fonda had already taken a large advance, he was given the supporting role of Mr. Whitehead, while John Huston replaced Fonda in the lead role. Assonitis and Huston got along so well that the former subsequently cast him in another lead role, in The Visitor (1979).

For the U.S. release, several cast and crew adopted "American"-sounding aliases, including director Ovidio G. Assonitis (as "Oliver Hellman"), composer Stelvio Cipriani ("S.W. Cipriani"), editor Angelo Curi ("A.J. Curi") and actor Enzo Bottesini ("Alan Boyd").

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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