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I was not expecting much when I watched this film via Amazon Prime and it managed to still be worse than my expectations. Perhaps I thought it would be better due to Rick Baker being part of the team behind this and I know it knows how to do great make up and such, but this one featured a monster that could not open or close its mouth, blink and it only minimally moved its eyes. There are a couple of good kills where I believe Baker had to have a hand in, but otherwise this film is a bit slow. I mean, I watched Slugs the other night and the slugs were faster killers than Octaman!

The story has scientist testing water in a Latin American country and they discover a small octopus with strange eyes and rubber texture. Okay, they didn't mention its rubbery look, I did, as it looks like a toy I once had as a young child. Well they get some guy to back their expedition and they travel on a magical RV where if you look out the window you can see Africa! Seriously, at one point the woman looks out the window and sees a Cheetah. Well, when they arrive they find the person they left behind dead and they begin to search for the large creature and one of them keeps getting hit in the face by it, they capture it and manage to lose it within seconds and they get trapped in a cave that seemed like its only purpose in the movie was to pad out the film!

So we have bad looking monster, a very unlikable cast and very little in the way of gore and no nudity. Sure this film is nice to make fun of, but as they are in that cave you want to yell at the television for that one guy just to call to the others to come on instead of crawling back through the cave to get them. So if I am rooting for someone in this flick it is the monster who keeps blowing its opportunities to kill everyone cause he wants the woman...I don't know why as he has no genitals to speak of.

So, if you want to watch this, be prepared to make a joke or two. I am surprised it was never featured on MST3K back in the day. The monster looks like he was built to battle Godzilla, but Godzilla said he would not work with such a trashy looking opponent so it got regulated to one of those Ultraman ripoff shows instead. Even the creatures in Green Slime looked a hundred times better, as you can literally see the boots on the tentacles it is walking on!

The three stars out of ten is because of the fun I had laughing at this god-awful movie. Absolutely hysterical. Ridiculous monster, a totally unbelievable Kerwin Matthews, and Pier Angeli, who died shortly after this film was completed. I watched the entire movie fascinated by two things, the horrible monster costume, and Pier Angeli, who was once a very promising young actress back in the 1950's. She still looked good, but what a waste for her to act in something like this. Even more sad is that this apparently was her final acting job. Very sad. It is hard to believe that this was the only role that she would be hired for. I had read that she had hoped to act in The Godfather, and also that she had overdosed before finding out that she had been hired for a role on Bonanza. Does anyone know if she accidentally overdosed, or did she commit suicide?

In reality, It will bore you to death and make you cry!!! A pathetic 50's style rubber monster that appears as if he will fall over at any moment. The acting is bad, the effects are bad (Poor Rick Baker), the photography is terrible (It appears as though some scenes were filmed with the lens cap on!!!) and Harry Essex has got to be the most incompetent director ever!!!!

I loved every minute of it!

Directed by Harry Essex, co-scriptwriter of '50s Universal classic Creature From The Black Lagoon, '70s drive-in eco-horror Octaman is a lesson in how not to make a monster movie. Within seconds, Essex has revealed his tentacled titular creature in all of its rubbery glory -- a laughable man-in-a-suit creation that walks stiffly whilst flailing its flaccid limbs, it's completely immobile face in a constant look of surprise, as though it's just sat on a cactus (it does live in Mexico, after all!).

Having provided viewers with a good laugh at the expense of its monster, Octaman has little else to give, the remainder of the film consisting of countless encounters between a plucky band of marine biologists and the manky mollusc man, none of which are all that thrilling. In true movie monster fashion, the creature attacks the men, but carries off the film's only female (Pier Angeli), not once but twice, making it a lot like the Creature From the Black Lagoon - in spirit, at least.

With repetitive, dreadfully dull action, terrible performances, and a truly pathetic monster, Octaman is totally inept in almost every way imaginable, BUT it's still essential viewing for avid fans of practical special effects, the film being the first paid gig for future seven-time Oscar winner, make-up legend Rick Baker. Hard to believe that in the short space of one decade he went from A Mutant Octopus in Latin America to An American Werewolf in London.

2/10. Amazingly, this is not Harry Essex's worst film: his next movie, The Cremators, is a steaming 1/10 pile of garbage.

Screenwriter Harry Essex, who'd worked on such classics as "It Came from Outer Space" and "The Creature from the Black Lagoon", does his first genre feature as a director in this 1971 schlock favourite that could just as easily have been made in the 1950s. It has that sort of feel to it, and one can believe that this script of his may have been in existence since that decade.

It's silly fun with an ecological function as scientists working in an unidentified Latin American country seek to prove the effects of radiation on the animal kingdom. As one can clearly see, Essex still had CftBL very much on his brain with the way this ultimately turns into a beauty and the beast tale.

Well meaning Dr. Rick Torres (fantasy star Kerwin Mathews, looking incredibly serious) and his crew soon run into the almighty Octaman, a humanoid octopus thing shambling along in the way that only men in rubber costumes can do.

Character actor Read Morgan is the man in the suit, and does what he has to do quite adequately. Co-starring are lovely Pier Angeli (who died during production) as a typical damsel in distress, whose function is to basically scream at the monster and be carried off on more than one occasion, and Jeff Morrow ("This Island Earth", "The Giant Claw") who actually has only one scene as Ricks' associate Dr. John Willard. The supporting cast is mostly made up of unknowns, although Buck Kartalian, as the ill-fated Raul, had a long career in film, doing everything from "Planet of the Apes" to "Please Don't Eat My Mother".

Octaman himself, limply flopping tentacles and all, is endearing all the way, and represents an early effort for Rick Baker, who designed the costume with Doug Beswick. Essex makes no attempt to reveal the monster a bit at a time, preferring to showcase it every chance he gets. His movie isn't totally without atmosphere and suspense, but it goes on too long and gets too talky. It tends to get boring whenever the monster isn't doing his thing.

However, it has undeniable bad movie charm that makes it impossible to truly dislike. And in the tradition of "Bride of the Monster", it's a hoot to see the victims of Octaman have to basically kill themselves while fumbling with the fake arms. A little bit o' gore here and there is an asset, while in one scene one of the most obvious and unconvincing dummies of all time gets tossed off a cliff. This isn't as much fun as one could want, but lovers of so-bad-it's-good cinema should be moderately entertained.

Five out of 10.

When I was seven or eight years old I dug an old VHS tape out of the back of my father's video collection. VHS was becoming mainstream back then and my father was a fanatic for building recording as much as he could. One tape in particular was labeled "Octaman Halloween movie," and I couldn't resist to pop it in the flip top VCR.

I was little, and like all kids scared easily. This movie didn't scare me as much as it amused me. It must have been envisioned by a child, then written and produced by his second grade buddies. Nevertheless, I watched "Octaman" all the way through and still have the tape. The movie itself is ridiculous in plot, hopelessly acted and shoddily realized. Had Tod Browning or James Whale directed this mess I'd still be uncertain it could have been anything but what it is... the epitome of a B movie crap. But it's entertaining crap for the simplest reasons. We know that these characters: the goofy scientist, the heroic and handsome group leader, the gun toting marlboro man, and of course the obligatory "red crew member" guy will come face with this thing and probably, hopefully die.

This is schlocky entertainment at its worst and seems to break just about every law of nature I've come to understand. Would atomic energy really make such a gross deformity of a single creature of a species that doesn't exist in the everglades, or southwest, or wherever they filmed this? If so, why does this thing walk on land? Why is it apparently carnivorous and so hostile? Is this some kind of genetic experiment gone wrong, a la Doctor Moreau? Movies like this never make any real attempt to answer these questions, and that's what earns them a B status.

Still, I have a small nook of appreciation for "Octaman" as terrible as it is (and so terrible it's not even funny) because I found it amusing when I was just a little kid searching through my father's VHS collection wondering what makes a movie good, and what makes a movie bad. I found the latter, and have come to understand the difference.

The thing about Octaman is that, as a film, it doesn't do anything right. The acting is horrible, the plot is moronic, the special effects are...rudimentary. The monster is gloriously ridiculous. Yeah, we've all seen movies like this before. But Octaman ticks every single box on the "entertainingly horrible" checklist, and does so with such thoroughness that I had a few seconds of thinking it had to be a parody. Looking it up here...nope. 1971. Holy crap.

Not only is it gloriously terrible, it actually blazes new trails in failure. The movie is set in Mexico, and is listed here as a Mexican co-production with the US. But the "Mexican" accents of the locals are just as cringingly terrible as everything else. How do you make a movie in Mexico, with a presumably Mexican crew, yet somehow manage to hire actors who look the part, but can't fake the accent? That there's an accomplishment, I don't care what anybody says.

Rubber suit monsters are almost invariably ridiculous looking (I think we all know the exception that proves this rule.) Even the most inept director has to realize that the best strategy is to keep the monster in shadow, or at least mysteriously lurking somewhere just offscreen. Nope, not here. Octaman is plainly visible, frequently in broad daylight. There's even a scene where they light a ring of fire around him, for added visibility (speaking of new levels of dumb, the fire "burns up the oxygen" around it, which makes it pass out. I am thankful to this movie for teaching me that suffocation is one of the dangers of lighting a fire in an open field.)

That's not a spoiler, by the way. It's just one of the assorted ways they try and fail to control the monster.

I admit that I'm still not 100% convinced this isn't, on some level, a parody.

I will be watching Octaman again soon.

It's a decently scary movie. I put it in my top 5 monster movie list. Watch it and I think you'll like it too.

Far-out retread into "Creature from the Black Lagoon" territory, this time with a giant rubber octopus-man emerging from a river to terrorize a hapless film crew--err, scientific expedition. It's no coincidence that the screenplay was done by the same guy who wrote the original "...Black Lagoon", the whole movie is a throwback to 50s sci-fi, when radiation had the strange ability to instantly send ordinary creatures through mutations that would normally take about seventeen generations to accomplish.

"Octaman" is in that same shameless spirit, this time molding the aesthetic into a distinctly 70s-era production. The results are fairly laughable, although that may have been what the filmmakers were intending all along. The "octaman" (and his ordinary-sized cohorts) simply must be seen to be (dis)believed. Of course nobody thought this movie was going to be brilliant when it was made, it was produced in an era when cheapie horror films were readily produced as part of the drive-in/grindhouse circuit. "Octaman" fits that bill quite nicely, and only bogs down in the talky sections of the film. As long as the rubber arms are a-wavin', it's a real hoot.

Stars ex-swashbuckler Mathews and Mediterranean movie-starlet Angeli as the principals of an scientific expedition into Mexico whose radiation tests prelude the discovery of a mutated octopus-human creature who they've upset when they disturbed its young.

Jeff Morrow has a small supporting role as a learned biologist, before the film rapidly unravels into farce with the absurd octopus-man (something akin to the Creature from the Black Lagoon whose POV we get to enjoy in true Octa-vision style) preying on members of the expedition seemingly at-will. Predictably, tensions between the personalities fray with the typical moral dilemma of 'preserve versus destroy' causing conflict. Pay close attention and you'll spot beefy Buck Kartalian in a brief role early in the picture, whilst veteran Read Morgan is naturally unrecognisable in the rubbery monster suit.

Micro-budget sci-fi has the gills of a 50's monster mash and consequently looks about ten years older than it is (1971), spouting truly inane dialogue and offers little to recommend except some unintentional laughs as Octaman basically goes berserk on the inept science crew. If you're a fan of the 50's style monster movie you might appreciate the effort, sadly though, it's also memorable as Pier Angeli's disappointing film epitaph and so along with the rest of the cast, might only be appealing to mainstream as nostalgia.

'Octaman' is a pretty nice monster movie from early 70's and includes one of the sweetest rubber costumes in the whole movie history. Created by Sixth time Oscar award winner special effects guru Rick Baker ('Gorillas in the Mist)creature is a half man half octopus mutant, who terrorizes people in a small Mexican village. A group of scientists tries to catch the creature but Octaman seems to be much smarter than he looks. Some people will die and some will survive to stand up in the final battle against the powerful freak of nature. To be honest with you - this movie isn't good. Actually it's hilariously bad, laughable flick with bad acting and totally lack of gore. The music is boring as hell and cinematography for sure isn't the first rate,but in overall 'Octaman' is a cult classic of bad movies and as I said it has one of the greatest costumes in movie history to date. Strong tentacles and scary red eyes -that's the Octaman device. Absolutely must see for monster movies fans! It definitively needs a proper DVD release in a good quality and with some extras. 6 out 10 for this cult trash.

"is this just bad or actually so bad it is funny and/or good (SBIIFOG)?" Hardcore schlock horror fans will watch it no matter what, so my comments are directed to those fence-sitters who are making the decision whether or not to spend the next 2 hours or so watching OCTAMAN. I'm sure there are a lot of you out there. 3:05 pm: I am sitting down now to watch an encore presentation of OCTAMAN. Back later with my opinions. 3:10pm: OK, still early, but I can say the special effects so far are about as bad as I've ever seen. SBIIFOG potential high. 3:15 pm: This is something like "The Thing With Two Heads" without the great acting. Back to the show. 3:18 WTF?? WTF is this?? I can tell you right now this one is worth watching for the humor value.

Hope it helps.

On edit: I watching another encore presentation of OCTAMAN on MonstersHD. I do the tough job so you don't have to. All I can say is this movie just lowers the bar for no-budget horror flicks about ten feet. This movie is a complete insult to any kind of film making. Now others will churn out more drek and say "but it's not as bad as Octaman!"

With "Octaman", my buddy and I were pretty much convinced to have stumbled upon the ultimate bad movie! This initially looked like brilliantly bad entertainment with a horrendously inefficient environmental message and some of the most pitiable and cheesy costumes we would ever have seen. Well, it's bad all right … but not necessarily in the entertaining way that we were anticipating. "Octaman" is a long lost relative of the wonderful Creature of the Black Lagoon"; a half man and half sea serpent monster with a ludicrous head and six tentacles. There isn't much of a plot to describe, but writer/director Harry Essex (co-writer of the original aforementioned classic – believe it or not) does his very best to show off with the rubber suit as much as possible. Octaman is literally always luring from behind a bush or with the top of his dumb head sneakily emerging from the water. The continuity in this film is far lost, the characters (supposedly another scientific expedition) are lame wooden stereotypes and the screenplay takes itself way too seriously. There isn't any attempt to insert any humor, unless you think it's hilarious that the Octaman is credited as "himself". When the monster kidnaps the girl and flees towards the water whilst holding her, the image suspiciously looks a lot like that legendary poster of "This Island Earth", with Faith Domergue in the arms of big-headed alien. This proves all the more that "Octaman" got made and released approximately fifteen years overdue. At heart, this is a genuine 50's movie, but in the 70's it doesn't even qualify as a half-decent homage and ends up being a wacky and boring film.

It's like this, if the monster were simply amazing and the action scenes were like-wise, this could have been an enthralling movie. But as it stands "Octaman" is essentially an hour and a half of nothing. Incidental humor is the movies only merit and it is without doubt one of the lamest monster movies of all time. Though even more horrifying yet, is the fact that there are at least three other monster flicks that are even lamer (Curse of Bigfoot, The Creeping Terror and Night Fright - not to be confused with Fright Night, which isn't bad).

So what's so bad about Octaman, well in short, everything.

Much of it's story-line is clearly lifted from the 1954 Universal classic "Creature from the Black Lagoon", so you have a good idea of what it's plot is about; and as it turns out one of the writers of Creature from the Black Lagoon also directed Octaman, but obviously without the same level of skill or success. Now to the heart of the film, the monster itself; or more accurately the suit that makes the monster. It's looks terrible. But sadly I've seen even worse. If the monster were spectacular looking much of the movies short-comings could be overlooked, but with the Octaman costume... well that's not even close to happening. Going by the title one would expect eight arms and for them all to be functional, however only two are, the other two simply hang limp, do nothing and wish they weren't in the movie. Granted many shots of the monsters head and face are amusing, but again that's only because the latex suit is so poorly designed and stupid looking. Which is another comparison one could make with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, it's monster-costume-design is amazing looking and a truly iconic creation, yet with Octaman...well it simply sucks and is UN-iconic, to say the least. Another thing to mention >>that's impossible to miss<< is how lacking in energy the monster is. Is someone's grandpa in that suit!?

As you'll see Octaman frequently bores you with several tedious go-nowhere scenes, such as the 5 minute-long night time boat scene or the lengthy tunnel crawling sequence, twice with that one. It's strange (and a break from the formula) at how few of the characters are killed by the monster, which was certainly a bad idea. Because as you know with these movies that's what's supposed to happen, the Monster kills several people and then at the end - several people kill it. That's how the formula goes, but not with Octaman. There's simply not enough mayhem to make for an exciting and entertaining monster romp; which happens to feature a monster that's so slow and so lame anyone could out-pace it, simply by walking away at a casual rate. Simply put the monster has no menace, and since the monster IS the movie, Octaman as a whole packs no menace what so ever and as a result is a profoundly boring movie. To put it another way, Octaman is to the world of cinema, that cold oatmeal is to the world of fine dining. It's no wonder that this pathetic movie was recently selected for satire by the guys from Rifftrax and to be honest that due to how dull this movie is, even they, in certain scenes, had a hard time injecting it with any sort energy or momentum. One reviewer claims that 90% of the film is "grinding tedium" and he is correct.

One other observation I could mention is: Whenever a movie dedicates that much screen-time to something as utterly mundane as a motor-home, well...you should not expect much from that movie. There must be half a dozen shots of the gangs RV doing nothing more than lazily traversing long stretches of unremarkable back roads; or even more riveting yet it can be seen lighting up the screen in several scenes with the cast gathered around it, doing such exciting things such as talking and drinking coffee or sitting in lawn-chairs while eating sandwiches.....and drinking coffee. Yep, that's the level of film-making where talking about here, sounds riveting, right? And after awhile this RV of their's seems to somehow, someway, become a member of the cast. It's their mobile home base, without it they're powerless. And I must say that the vehicles speed is perfectly representative of the movies pace, that is very s-l-o-w.

So in closing Octaman is: Terribly lame. Terribly boring. And well frankly, terribly terrible.

A perfect representation on how to not make a movie. Bad sets, bad acting, bad use of stock footage, horrible effects. In fact, it's so horrible it's hilareous.

The ecologic idea of this film is even interesting. There's no big difference between "Octaman" and the conception of "Godzilla", which in the 70's was also incredibly laughable. The big failure was how poor it was made. And this was a very, very cheap film. The courageous actors couldn't do a miracle, but they had all the dignity of doing what they needed to do. A difference rises, if they are watched apart of the surreal monster character.

After watching "Octaman" we understand why the special effects in Sci-Fi films must be a step above of their era. Fortunately, the first Star Wars film (in which Mr. Baker- co-author of the "Octaman" monster and after academy-awarded winner- seems to have learned a lot) came in rescue few years after "Octaman" to change the poor panorama of Sci-Fi films until the 70's.

Anyway, this film attracts so much attention, despite of the main monster character has been so bad constructed, has been so badly filmed and edited, having so deep weakness in the script, that it deserves a new version, exactly what was made with Godzilla. As a child I was scared with this film, at least with its first half, and as adolescent, sincerely entertained. It's understandable that there is a list where "trash" cinema fans put "Octaman" as one of their 50 favourite films. It's so… so strange that it becomes good.

Finally, a time ago some Maritime Ecology site made sympathetic comments about the idea of "Octaman", relating the increasing number of giant octopus found dead in the world coast. It seems to be an important theme nowadays, upon which a well written and done film could be based on, in a new version for "Octaman".

Note: 8

Just got done watching Octaman and I must say this movie is hilarious. Nothing better then seeing a guy dressed in a plastic octopus suit running around killing people. This movie is truly one of those lost gems that fans of horror should see at one point or another.

The storyline is about as obvious as they get. What happens when an octopus is exposed to radiation? Well, we get a half man, half octopus. Put them together and we get all terror! Octaman is running around the Mexican country side killing random people. A group of scientific researchers get involved to try and capture the beast.

Wow this film was great! I was laughing through most of it. I was worried about watching it because I thought it was going to be one of those movies that is filled with nothing but ridiculous dialog but I was proved wrong as Octaman is basically the star of the movie. Most of the time we see him killing people in a most humorous way.

I had a lot of fun with this movie and it held my interest until the end. If you are a fan of modern day horror you probably won't like this, but if you are a fan of grindhouse horror, this is definitely a fun movie. 6/10

A very low budget and barmy monster flick from the 1970's in which a mutant octopus-man terrorizes about 6 people on a jungle expedition. Not widely known or seen, Octaman doesn't really do much with it's central idea, but then again what really is the scope for a film where the threat is one single man in an octopus suit? The story is slim: a wildlife expedition finds a little octopus with big starey eyes on a riverbank and take it back to their tent for study. Later that night a big daddy Octaman with even bigger starey eyes come to reclaim his little-un! Things go on like this for a while, with lots of nighttime scenes showing the rubbery menace stomping around the compound looking for trouble and whacking people to death with his tentacles. Unfortunately it's very easy to see right from the start that Octaman is a guy in a rubber suit with an extra fake tentacle on each arm and an extra fake tentacle on each leg...these don't move much and the effect is sadly mostly unconvincing. The old motto that "less is more" could have worked well here: if the monsters ugly face and flailing limbs were seen a bit less clearly, the audience might find things a bit more intriguing, but after the first 30 minutes, the Octaman has been seen very clearly from every angle multiple times, and I was getting bored of him! Especially as the majority film never leaves the same wretched riverbank for almost an hour, and just shows Octaman coming out of the water to camp, attacking people and then going back in again.

Acting is so-so, but acceptable, from the limited cast of 6, and at least the monster is fun to watch. Although I did find two things a bit silly – the POV "Octa-vision" shots show his vision to be faceted into hexagons like a fly-eye view might be, even though he has big round single lens eyes. And his permanently wide open mouth has plenty of angry looking sharp teeth but no throat opening at all – it just looks like a teeth-fringed green saucer! For these reasons and the very underwhelming climax, I can understand why "Octaman" has not become a cult hit..shame really, but it's just not very exciting.

OCTAMAN concerns an expedition to "a small Latin American fishing community", to investigate high radiation levels. After the team discovers an almost real-looking, rubber octopus, the "specimen" is tossed in a bucket for safekeeping. This causes the even less realistic, titular terror to lumber forth to seek revenge. Horror, death, and ecological ballyhoo commence.

This infamous piece of ultra-schlock cinema is a cavalcade of sleepy non-actors reciting absurd dialogue, seemingly learned while they were filming. Of course, the real "star" is the 8' tall mound of silicone itself. To be honest, the costume, designed by Rick Baker, would have been far less of an embarrassment had it been used only sparingly, filmed only in the dark, and / or from a great distance. Alas, the pitiful creature is in nearly every scene, its extra arms flapping lifelessly as it staggers about.

Anyone who can recall the old Squiddly Diddly cartoons will notice the uncanny resemblance here.

Still, as ridiculous as it is, this movie is a lot of fun to watch!...

Easily one of the worst movies ever made. Amazing that it was made by adults as a serious movie. The baby monsters do not have any moving parts, not even their eyes move. They are clumsily pulled around by strings. The eyes of papa (or mama?) monster do not move either. Hilarious (if you skip the parts without the monster).