Tentacles (1977)

A giant octopus, driven mad by high-frequency signals from equipment being used in the construction of a tunnel, starts snatching an oceanside town's residents out of their boats and strollers, and it's up to journalist Ned Turner (John Huston), Sheriff Robards (Claude Akins), and marine biologist Will Gleason (Bo Hopkins) to stop the sanguinary cephalopod.

It all starts when a mother parks her baby's stroller by the water and then leaves the child unattended for a moment while she goes to chat with a friend. She returns to find the stroller floating in the sea and her baby nowhere in sight (this is one thing I like about films of the 70s. If Tentacles had been made in the 90s or 2000s, it would've turned out that the baby had somehow survived. In the 70s, they weren't afraid to kill off a baby or two, and a lot of filmmakers probably would've had the kid's severed head float up to the surface for good measure). Later, a boat captain (complete with pegleg) is seen being dragged into the depths by one of his crewmen. The crew member isn't able to see the creature responsible for the captain's descent to Davy Jones' Locker, but when the remains are found later there's not much left.

Ned and the sheriff puzzle over what animal could've torn all the flesh from Captain Pegleg's skeleton and even sucked some of the marrow from his bones. They have no answers, so they turn to Will Gleason, who posits that the culprit is a giant octopus. More and more people begin to disappear, and Will is finally forced to come up with a creative way of dealing with the molluscan menace. I don't want to give anything away, but it involves killer whales.

Judging by its average rating on IMDb (3.2), most people didn't like this movie as much as I did. I can understand, to a point. There are some problems with the script. Actually, it often seems as though all copies of the script were lost at some point and the cast and crew had to reconstruct it from memory during filming. Glaring errors abound:

1.  As a compromise, Will Gleason assures his wife that rather than dive to 140 feet as he'd planned, he'll go no lower than 120 feet. A couple scenes later, she tells her sister that he promised to dive no lower than 150 feet.

2.  Though it's been established that the creature is a giant octopus, Ned refers to it as a giant squid at one point (perhaps this is meant to show that he doesn't care enough to distinguish between the two, or perhaps in an early draft of the script the monster was a giant squid and no one bothered to change Huston's copy, and then they didn't want to piss him off by asking him to do another take).

3.  The worst error is when Shelley Winters's character, Tillie, calls her son by the wrong name. Winters was in her mid-50s when this film was made, yet her character is supposed to be Ned's (played by 70-year-old Huston) older sister and she has a ten-year-old son. Seemingly suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's, Tillie first has trouble recalling her son's last name

and then confuses his first name with that of his friend.

(and whose idea was that hat in the first clip?)

If you can ignore flaws like these, and if you can cope with subplots that go nowhere or are left unresolved, and I can do both, you might enjoy Tentacles. Particularly if you like awesome diving scenes, aquatic life of all kinds, and a director (Ovidio G. Assonitis) who isn't afraid to experiment.

One more note: Maybe it's just that seeing John Huston had some part of my mind thinking about Chinatown, but I couldn't help but notice that one of the film's actors had the first name Claude and another had the last name Mulvihill.