Podcast: Tentacles
Everyone is acting in a different movie and some of these actors are making it up as they go along.
99 Cent Rental Podcast
Episode 47: Tentacles
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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.
Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.
This week we abandon our original idea to cover the utterly insane 1987 Karate Kid ripoff Karate Warrior with something with a little more meat on the bone, Tentacles. The 70’s was an embarrassment of riches, and in many case just plain embarrassing when it came to the animal attack cash-grabs that arose from the titanic success of Jaws. This is one such movie, a unique twist on American International Pictures’ typical process of working with foreign films. Rather than import some cheap Italian movies they hired Italian producer Ovidio Assonitis to make a movie here in America with an Italian crew and a star-studded cast of Oscar winners who couldn’t say no to a fast paycheck and a little bit of that California sun.
Starring John Huston, Bo Hopkins, Henry Fonda, and more, this blatant Jaws ripoff treads water for 90 minutes, peppering its story with strange asides and bon mots, with characters who trot into each scene to ad-lib and keep their scene partners guessing until it comes time to take on the film’s big bad villain, a giant octopus that can’t keep its tentacles off anything that swims into its proximity. Is mankind to blame for its feeding frenzy? Maybe? Who can say, really? There’s a rich industrialist whose underwater construction project may have something to do with it but this is AIP and it’s asking way too much for anyone to answer any questions ever. Just go with it.
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