Movies about Tentacle
Tentacles. Appendages used to ensnarl prey and drag them into the maw of whatever they’re attached to. Are they unnerving? Oh, yes, absolutely. Terrifying? For a good amount of people, definitely. Sexy? Depending on your perspective, sure! While the concept of tentacles isn’t too forgotten in the grand scheme of things, I’m primarily talking about the giant octopuses/squids famous for them… it just sounded cooler to have “Tentacles” as the title rather than “Octopuses, Squids, and Friends,” you know?
Giant cephalopods are old hat when it comes to the legends and myths surrounding the vast, cold sea. I mean, everyone knows about the Kraken. Giant octopus, big hugger, drags ships down to the ocean floor because it’s lonely or something. It’s a household name. However, despite that being the case, there are relatively few horror flicks based solely on the idea of some sea-dwelling beast coiling its arms around unsuspecting victims to give them a one way trip down to Davy Jones’s Locker.
Besides last year’s Big Octopus (a Chinese flick that I literally just heard about), I can’t think of any recent films starring a colossal cephalopod of any kind. But that’s okay, because there’s a handful from the last 50 years or so that we can check out! So grab your scuba gear and ready your harpoons, because we’re going to dive into open ocean and see if releasing the Kraken really is as threatening as it sounds!
1. Chapadla
(Directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis; Starring John Huston, Shelley Winters, Bo Hopkins; 1977)
“A mutated giant octopus wreaks havoc on a California seaside community.” – via IMDB.
Possession is the best horror break-up movie featuring tentacle monster sex ever made
Ari Aster Midsommar opened to a plethora of critical acclaim and a slew of headlines claiming it to be one of the best break-up movies ever made. The black comedy horror about a couple on the brink who experience strange awakenings at a Pagan festival in Sweden certainly has all the benchmarks of a great break-up film: the splintering of the central relationship, the ways that seeming concern can cloak painful attacks, the overwhelming catharsis of a messy end, and so on. Aster tells the story through a genre lens, blending horror of the unreal with the painful truth of something many of us have or will go through in our lives.
But to call it the best break-up movie ever, even the best horror one? Well, Majetek would like to have a few words with you on that front.
1981 je Majetek is the work of Polish director Andrzej Żuławski, an art-house favorite whose work was frequently banned or challenged by the authorities in his homeland. Majetek is probably the best known of his titles outside of Europe thanks to its notoriety on the midnight movie circuit. If you haven’t seen it then you may know it by reputation, or as that movie where Isabelle Adjani f***s a monster.
In our long and tireless work at SYFY WIRE FANGRRLS to bring you the best in monster f***ing movies — from giant spiders to fish-men — it’s surprising that it took us this long to get to Majetek. In terms of films where a woman has a sexual encounter with a decidedly unhuman creature, this one is in a league of its own, stripped of any semblance of warmth and presented to its audience for the brutal experience that it is. As a break-up movie, it’s even more horrifying. If Midsommar is about the freedom of realizing you don’t need to be part of a broken partnership anymore, Majetek is about the beauty and danger of mutual annihilation.
The story follows Mark, a spy played by Sam Neill, who returns home to Berlin after a mysterious mission, only to find that his wife Anna — the aforementioned Isabelle Adjani — has left him. She tells him that she wants a divorce, offering no explanation but saying it’s not because she’s met someone else. Her new lover, Heinrich, enters the scene, but it becomes clear that Anna’s obsessive affections are not for him, and soon her behavior descends into violent erraticism.
Majetek was released in America with a heavily edited down cut of the movie that chopped a solid half-hour off the running time. In the UK, the film was banned outright as one of the infamous «video nasties», a collection of films distributed on videocassette in the 1980s that were censored amidst a campaign of moral outrage that deemed such titles to be too obscene for public consumption. Majetek is certainly a tough watch, but seeing it categorized alongside titles like Cannibal holocaust a Tváře smrti is puzzling, to say the least, especially since the BBFC (the British version of the MPAA) passed the film without any cuts no fewer than three times. Say what you want about the film’s titillating nature or whether or not it is deliberately designed to provoke, but you can’t deny that Żuławski takes this story of monster sex completely seriously. It has more in common with Lars Von Trier than slasher horror, a story of pure and utter hysteria that almost hurts to pay spectacle to.
Ari Aster admitted that Midsommar was inspired by his own break-up, and Żuławski went through something similar with Majetek. It shows in the final product, which feels like an open wound of a story, with each moment of the disintegration of this relationship violently discomfiting. There’s no way to hide from the agony of this grief. He wants you to see just how much it hurts to lose someone you loved and be steeped in that particular strain of madness. At one point, the pair attack one another and Mark slaps Anna repeatedly until blood pours from her nose. During another argument, they both hurt themselves with an electric knife. During one harrowing scene, Mark tries to induce vomiting by swallowing a feather he dug out of the trash.
Anna and Mark’s split tears apart everything around them, including their young son. Nobody is immune to this sickness. If society most praises the happy nuclear family unit then it stands to reason that it too will suffer when said family falls to pieces. Unlike Midsommar, there is no community, however twisted, for either party to turn to for solace. Well, Anna does have a partner of sorts.
At the shattered, screaming center of this movie is Isabelle Adjani. One of the true legends of French cinema, Adjani’s full-throated performance is as riveting as it is horrifying. In the movie’s most infamous scene, Anna has a full-on meltdown and seems to become possessed by some form of evil that leaves her wailing and writhing through a subway station. She smashes her shopping bags across the wall, pulsing and shaking as she rolls around in the filth. By the end, she is bleeding and spilling both blood and some sort of strange liquid from every orifice, a miscarriage of overwhelming pain that may or may not have birthed something inexplicable into this world.
And then there is that monster. It’s a tad reductive to refer to Majetek solely as another monster f***ing movie, if only because said creature copulation is one of the less horrifying aspects of the story. Anna nurtures the octopus-like animal, more alien than anything from our world and always covered in blood, mostly with sex but it is also implied that she is feeding it human flesh. This reveal comes about an hour into the movie, with nothing in the preceding hour of relationship drama even hinting at the possibility of the supernatural. It’s unpredictable and utterly bonkers, but then again, so is everything else in the movie, a rare experience of true cinematic madness that’s tough to replicate. To put it bluntly, sometimes sh*t happens, we can’t predict it, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Anna has destroyed everything around her but this monster. She nurtures it, is seemingly more tender with it than anyone else in her life, and driven to see its evolution through to its unknown conclusion. It’s not necessarily a union of passion and the narrative doesn’t play this as a sexual awakening in the way a lot of these stories do. The film never offers any easy answers on what this monster is, where it came from, or what its ultimate purpose is. That would be too easy, and as with many a break-up, things are seldom so clean. It’s easy to see this thing she has birthed and obsessively loves as the end result of expelling so much hate and evil from her body. It’s a way to destroy the world and start over.
What is born in its place is a new person, or to be more accurate, a new version of familiar people. After Anna has “finished” with her monster, it has evolved into a doppelganger of Mark, identical to him except in eye color. Perhaps this new Mark, born of pure pain but seemingly untouched by it, can do better than the old Mark. Or maybe his mere existence will destroy everything all over again. The latter seems more likely in this story. There’s no salvation for anyone after this break-up.
Názory a názory vyjádřené v tomto článku jsou autorovými a nemusí nutně odrážet názory SYFY WIRE, SYFY nebo NBC Universal.
‘Into The Dark: Tentacles’ Has Sex and Ear Trauma, But Needed To Take More Risks [Review w/ Gayly Dreadful]
Hulu’s (formerly monthly) anthology series with Blumhouse returns for Valentine’s Day.
2.11 “Tentacles”: A couple falls head-over-heels into a new romance and entwine their lives–until their intimacy transforms into something terrifying.
Well here we are, Terry. I wasn’t sure if we had seen the last of Do Temnoty , but thankfully July 2020’s Současný obyvatel – arguably one of the franchise’s worst entries – isn’t the end of the road.
Instead we’re back with a new instalment and I feel like we won’t have an issue digging up things to discuss because the Nick Antosca / Alexandra Pechman— scénář, Clara Aranovich-měřováno Tentacles is a lot .
The plot, in a nutshell, features transient, or “displaced”, Tara (Dana Driori), who is crashing open houses looking for a place to sleep. At one failed venue, she has a meet-cute with commercial photographer Sam (Casey Deidrick), whom she overhears bickering with his business partner & friend Esther (Kasey Elise). Before you can say cunnilingus, Tara and Sam are going at it and she’s ingratiating herself into his life, renovating his parents’ run-down house for a potential flip.
Over time, the two become more and more domestic and Sam eventually proposes marriage, which doesn’t sit well with Esther because a) he’s changed, and b) she’s low-key in love with him. The other issue is that SPOILERS Tara is secretly a tentacled creature that uses sex to ensnare its victims before adopting their physical appearance, killing them, and taking over their lives. Rinse, lather, repeat.
All in all, it’s a minor spin on a pretty familiar tale: a man seduced by great sex from a hot, mysterious woman; a relationship that’s too good to be true; a best friend who offers warnings and is ultimately killed for knowing too much. Hell, even the downer ending, which confirms that Sam is simply the latest in a long line of victims (of both sexes!), plays a little too safe.
Don’t get me wrong, Terry, I actually liked Tentacles more than a lot of the entries that we’ve covered. It’s more streamlined than some of the messier entries and there’s enough intrigue in the first act to prevent things from feeling like it’s an hour long episode stretched to feature length.
Whether or not this was always intended as a Valentine’s Day-themed entry, Tentacles is also possibly the most graphic entry in the franchise we’ve seen with regards to sex. Antosca and Pechman lean hard into the succubus-like qualities of their villain and Aranovich finds plenty of creative ways to get around gun-shy censors with no less than two extended, fairly graphic sex scenes. Kudos to Driori and Deidrick for giving such bare performances.
And yet there’s also something holding Tentacles back from greatness. To me, one frustration is the queer elements lurking on the story’s periphery that are never fully explored.
Consider the moment that Tara takes on Sam’s visage when she is giving him head so that it looks like he’s fellating himself. This by be a great uncanny moment, but Antosca and Pechman’s script immediately knocks Sam out and then rushes through his disorientation to focus on a break-in. Why not let the implications of this visual linger and really revel in that discomfort?
Obviously as gay reviewers it’s hard not to look at this fairly straight forward tale of a dumb dude and his ultra hot, very sexually active new girlfriend and consider the queer story that could have been. But honestly, aside from the sexual progressiveness of this tale, it’s simply not boundary pushing enough. It’s a made-for-Hulu version of Benson and Moorhead’s Jaro with R-rated sex scenes. Tentacles is doing a decent enough job of it, but this could have really pushed some boundaries.
Terry, did you have the same frustrations with the straight orientation of the film? Did the front half of Tentacles do enough for you or is this just another padded entry in the franchise? And what did you think of Esther’s death: is it a tragic love cut short, the usual sacrificial black friend in a horror film, or both?
I purposefully watched this entry in Ve tmě not knowing anything about it, other than the title, Joe. For most of the episodes in this series, the “twists and turns” always felt incredibly obvious and I wondered if it was because I knew too much of the story and watched the trailers beforehand.
Going in cold created a refreshing start to Tentacles because I genuinely think the first act is an intriguing mix of showing us akorát dost of the tentacled monster in the slasher-esqe opening scene and then leaving us to ponder který the monster is. The setup worked for me, as it made sense that this woman managed to “escape” her situation and is now living open-house-to-open-house to stay a step ahead of her stalker.
The furtive steps Tara takes with Sam also work because it’s the straight, white rom-com we’ve been conditioned to expect. Cinematographer Sing Howe Yam also distracts us from the outward threat with extreme close-ups of their faces and lips and the incredibly sexy way Sam aggressively pulls open her legs, throws back her skirt and gets down in there. It’s a safely erotic moment that brought me back to the 90s erotic thriller.
I loved the sped-up sex scene where the two go through the majority of sexual positions in a slightly blurred out fashion. I also liked Sam’s use of consent as he tried new moves. There’s nothing sexier than consent and when he places his hand on her throat and asks if it turns her on, allowing her to have control, worked for me.
Their sex talk also charmed me, particularly when they sit down on Tara’s inflatable mattress and Sam says, “who needs sexy music when you have an air mattress.” Or, later, in a completely different sort of intimate moment, he tells her “happy four months, weirdo,” as she pops a back zit. It’s funny and intimate. This is the kind of discussion that feels authentic; it’s two new lovers figuring each other out.
Unfortunately, by the end of the first act I absolutely knew that Tara wasn’t who (or what) she said she was and I spent most of the second act impatiently waiting for our dumb, sweet himbo Sam to catch up.
I try not to talk about the movie that “wasn’t” when discussing films, but I couldn’t help but notice how Tentacles couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. It felt like it could lean into the paranoid erotic thriller subgenre and we’d have a second act spent focusing on Sam’s attempt to understand who he’s dating and her mysterious dark past. But it stubbornly tries to be a standard romantic drama and unfortunately the conflict that arises between the two of them in the early half of act two felt forced and unrealistic.
For instance, when Sam enters his childhood home after Tara has begun renovations, he makes a comment that she’s made a lot of changes. She understandably replies that he told her to and whether she did something wrong? His response is “where’s my fucking keys” and she shouts, “Fine – I’m out.” It’s a weird escalation that ends with him talking about his parents’ death and it felt like the kind of non-conflict that bothers me in films like this. In absence of the paranoid thriller tropes, the entire conflict becomes relationship drama and, unfortunately, I don’t think the script is up to the task.
I ended up relating to Esther who is constantly amazed that they are progressing towards marriage when he barely knows her. She’s the audience’s viewpoint and because she’s sadly not in the film as much as I’d like, it left me to incredulously shake my head at the conflict.
We needed more Esther. And because she doesn’t feel like a well-developed character and is only used to create more conflict through a few scenes, such as when she drops off his photography equipment, she becomes less a person and more, as you suggested, a trope. The sacrificial friend-zoned black friend.
To double-down on what you also suggested, I was sad that the queer aspects of Tentacles were used more for set-dressing and color. The idea of a shapeshifting creature/person is inherently queer as it almost always explores gender and identity. I liked that the creature calling itself Tara is comfortable exploring different genders and sexualities, but the narrative felt unwilling to fully commit. It felt like wasted potential.
The scene you mentioned above where Sam sees himself giving himself head was such a fascinating moment that was unfortunately played for shock. It’s moments like that that showed Antosca and Pechman knew what they were doing, but it felt as if they either weren’t brave enough (or permitted) to go there.
The drama and romance aside, I’m curious what you thought about the actual horror of Tentacles , Joe. Did the slight body horror (bloody Q-tips feel like a nightmare situation) connect? Did you like the concept behind the tentacled beast? And did the monstrous stomach tentacle give you Pohybovat se klouzavě vibes?
We’ve discussed the shoestring budgets and time constraints that these Ve tmě productions are working with ad nauseam, so I was willing to accept a decent (albeit not great) tentacle. Its size is actually a little surprising, considering that when Sam breaks into the bathroom, it seemed like he initially saw a series of small eel-like creatures in Tara’s place. I would have preferred Pohybovat se klouzavě (nebo Chvění ) sized creatures as they’re a little easier to pull off FX-wise than one large, torso-sized appendage.
Overall the ear stuff was the most effective for me. There are a couple of truly uncomfortable scenarios in horror films that will vždy work for me: anything with fingernails being ripped off, eyes being gouged, achilles being cut and, yes, ear drums being pierced are immediate shudder-inducing travesties.
So a bloody Q-tip? Ack!
Tara edging the end of her proboscis into Sam’s ear as he struggles to resist? Yes!
It all happens a little too quickly in that last act, but I appreciated that there was a decent pay-off after a fairly quiet second act. I particularly like the FX on Tara’s shifting visage when she drives Sam out to the desert to recover the money from the opening scene. Those flashes of past lives, and even seeing Sam come face to face with the horror that he has brought on himself proves to be good stuff.
Overall, I’m reasonably happy with this instalment. Again, I would have liked a few more risks, but Tentacles is a solid B- for me.
Terry: what’s your take on the final scene, which hints at more than one of these creatures? Would you be open to learning more about their origins/activities? And what’s your final score for this entry?
The best moment of the episode for me, Joe, was the final scene. From the reveal that there are more of these creatures to the implication that the two of those attractive men are going to just start boning to the world it opens up.
I’m not really sure I chtít to know more, though, because unless a sequel is framed completely differently (a la pooka ) I don’t think there’s a whole lot more a relatively low budget series could do with this material. So while I dug this scene and felt that it was a good – if narratively traditional – end to the story, I hope it ends here.
Ale můj oblíbený moment was actually the last line of the episode, particularly because it felt like a direct homage to Eyes Wide Shut , Jako Tentacles , Eyes Wide Shut is at least partially about fucking and intimacy (or lack thereof) and it all builds to such a fantastic set of dialogue between Alice (Nicole Kidman) and Bill (Tom Cruise) where she suggest there’s something they need to do as soon as possible. To which Bill replies, “What’s that?”
And her answer is: “Fuck.”
Here, we have the two tentacled monster men eye-screwing each other and the conversation is about whether there’s anything more calming than the ocean.
Tara/Sam Monster says there is, to which the other man says, “What’s that?” and the response is: “Fucking.” It’s just an interesting moment for me that made me chuckle more than anything because of how brazen of a…let’s call it homage…it is. I don’t think it has the same amount of darkly comedic gravitas that the line has in Eyes Wide Shut , ale to is a fun summation of what we just spent 90 minutes watching.
Tentacles is probably one of the better entries in Ve tmě and while it didn’t completely work for me, there’s enough there to be a “soft recommend” for fans of the series. C+
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