Octaman

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?

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!

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!...

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.

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.