Trailer
Plot summary
People keep disappearing from the water at Solana Beach, a seaside tourist resort, and the bodies that are found are stripped to the skeleton, with even the bone marrow gone. Sheriff Douglas Robards has no leads. Reporter Ned Turner is looking into the underwater tunnel that the Trojan company, whose president is Mr. Whitehead, is building beneath the bay, and Whitehead warns him to leave it alone. Turner puts his questions to Will Gleason, a marine expert and killer whale trainer. Nobody yet knows what animal could strip a body that way, and Turner suspects the tunnel work has something to do with it.
Cast
- Alan Boydas Mike
- Helena Mäkeläas Jamie's Mother (as Helena Makela)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Tentacles (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ovidio G. Assonitis wanted John Wayne to play reporter Ned Turner, and Wayne accepted; but when Assonitis visited him in Texas he saw the actor was far too ill for the part. Wayne died of cancer in June 1979.
- The production lost its large rubber octopus in the sea during filming, so the rest of the film was shot with a diver waving the only remaining tentacle.
- Henry Fonda was Assonitis's next choice for the lead, but he suffered a heart attack shortly before filming; because he had already taken a large advance he was moved to the supporting role of Mr. Whitehead, and John Huston took the lead instead.
- The first script for Tentacles was much more comedic and spoofed the killer-animal genre, until executive producer Samuel Z. Arkoff had his writer Steven W. Carabatsos retool it into something much more serious.
- A sequence in which the octopus destroys the Golden Gate Bridge was storyboarded but cut from the film because of time and budget constraints.
