EDITOR’S NOTE: You can check out my first take on this movie — posted December 20, 2018 — but I got so excited about watching it that I wrote something new.

Ovidio G. Assonitis just wants to entertain you. Starting in the 60s, when he brought Shaw Brothers movies to the west and started producing his own movies like The Labyrinth of Sex, Who Saw Her Die? and Man from Deep River, his films were lean, mean and audience pleasers, too. Supposedly, he tried to buy the rights to The Exorcist, which sounds kayfabe, because his Beyond the Door is literally the same movie.

So he already had some experience taking a blockbuster and making his own version. Therefore, when a great white shark took over the movie world, he made this one. He went so far to have Percy Rodrigues, who announced the trailers for all of the Jaws movies, read his sell copy.

Before we get to the movie, I really need to do a month of Assonitis produced and directed movies. Between this, the supposedly Emmanuelle Arsan-directed Laure, The Visitor, Madhouse, Piranha II: The Spawning, Iron Warrior, The Curse, Curse II: The Bite, Beyond the Door III, American Ninja 4: The Annihilation, Lambada and being the chairman of the newly relaunched Cannon Pictures Inc. after the departure of Menahem Golan and the restructuring of The Cannon Group.

Solana Beach is a seaside tourist resort dealing with undersea terror. And it’s not a shark. No, the title spoils it by revealing that a giant octopus in in town.

Science fact: According to America’s Oceans, “Giant Pacific Octopuses are creatures of high intelligence and high amicability. While they have the ability to inflict harm on humans if they wanted to, no attacks thus far have been fatal or even harmful.”

Also, I doubt if an octopus has foresight.

Unlike messy eaters like Orca — who didn’t even finish his meal of Bo Derek — or Piranha, this cephalopod leaves behind skeletons totally bereft of flesh, muscles and organs.

Assonitis spent nearly $1 million on a life-sized replica of the giant octopus, which promptly sank the exact second that it was put in the water. So the octopus that dies at the end? That’s a real one. An already dead one. But it’s getting torn up — spoiler — by killer whales, so the fact that a dead octopus is defiled should remind you that this is a movie made by Italians.

But hey –even though this movie is named Tentacles, octopuses don’t have tentacles. Instead, they have arms. Squid have tentacles. Again, an octopus have none. They also don’t roar, but then again, neither do sharks and that didn’t stop the creators of Jaws: The Revenge.

Back to the movie. The Trojan company has been building an underwater tunnels that uses radio signals that have driven the octopus insane. Blame Mr. Whitehead (Henry Fonda, who had a pacemaker put in right before this started filming, which is why he shot all his scenes in one day and barely moves in those scenes).

Marine expert Will Gleason (Bo Hopkins), Sheriff Robards (Claude Akins) and newspaper reporter Ned Turner (John Huston) are there to save the town, a pair of killer whales named Summer and Winter, who get a pep talk from Hopkins that makes me laugh every time I watch this.

“I guess you know now why I brought you here. I wanted to tell ya more about it, but there’ve been many people that died. I’ve lost a loved one. I need your help more now than ever. I remember the times when I was training you. People used to call you killers. They used to call me that on the streets. It doesn’t mean nothing. You have more love in your heart, more affection than any human being I ever met. But now, I can’t ask anybody else, so I’m asking you to help me kill this octopus. I hope you understand that. I know I’m in your environment. I don’t want it this way, but if I release you and you go away, I want ya to know I’ll understand. All right, enough said. I gotta go now. If you feel anything, you talk to me. Make some noises. I know people’ll think we’re crazy. Maybe we are. Maybe we are.”

Robert Shaw got the Indianapolis speech.

Bo Hopkins got talking to killer whales.

There’s a town festival scene right out of Spielberg and Shelley Winters is dressed like a child instead of a 57 year old woman. Also, she and John Huston literally disappear from the movie. Why were they in it? So that Shelley could have a kid talk to her this way?

Little boy: Mommy, you’re plump. There’s more to love.

Tillie Turner: Oh, sweet-talk me like your father.

If you like Italian casts, well, this movie is for you. Hey — there’s Cesare Danova from Cleopatra, The Astral Factor and Mean Streets. Here’s Biloxi, Mississippi born Sherry Buchanan who replaced a production secretary during the shooting of My Name Is Nobody in Louisiana and ended up moving to Italy where she was in What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, Eyes Behind the Stars, The Last House On the Beach and the movie that could be Starcrash 3, Escape from Galaxy 3. And take a look! It’s Delia Boccardo, Athena in Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules. Franco Diogene from Strip Nude for Your Killer!

It was written by Jerome Max (who only wrote six episodes of a soap opera otherwise), Tito Carpi (where to begin? Marta? Escape from the Bronx? Holy God, Here Comes the Passatore!?) and Steven W. Carabatsos, who wrote episodes of Ben Casey and The Big Valley.

Bringing all the Italian madness together is a score by Stelvio Cipirani, which uses the theme from another movie he worked on, La Polizia Sta a guarde, multiple times. Cipirani scored lots more jawsploitation movies like The Bermuda Triangle, Encounters in the Deep, Night of the Sharks, Bermuda: Cave of the Sharks and Piranha II: The Spawning.

Obviously, I must love this movie if I spent around a thousand words making fun of it.

The Kino Lorber blu ray comes with a trailer and a radio ad. You need this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie originally was on our site on March 16, 2021. Now, Kino Lorber has released it on blu ray with a 2K scan of the uncut Director’s Edition — featuring the legendary thought-to-be-lost fourth story involving a creepy tree witch — as well as an interview with star Gil Glasgow and a theatrical trailer. You can get it from Kino Lorber.

Screams of a Winter Night is a regional movie inspired by regional movies. Director James L. Wilson had played Santa Claus in the Disney movie Lefty, the Dingaling Lynx before getting inspired by the movies that Charles B. Pierce (The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Legend of Boggy Creek) and Joy Houck (Creature from Black Lake) made. It has that hallmark of the regional film, a producer who was really a guy with some cash that never made a movie before, in this case, Mark Lovell, who was a real estate agent. And a local named William T. Cherry III made the special effects.

This movie does what Are You Afraid of the Dark? did for several seasons on Nickelodeon. A bunch of young people sit around a campfire telling stories, forming an effective anthology story that moves well and keeps you interested.

But man, what is really wrong with the characters in this movie? They go to John’s family’s cabin, which before that had belonged to the Durand family, who who weren’t just mysteriously killed at the cabin, they were found in pieces all over the place, possibly murdered by a demon called the Shataba. Why would you stay there after hearing this?

Made in Shreveport, Louisiana and premiering there, this movie feels like urban legends come to life, like the “Moss Point Man” that attacks a couple on lover’s lane, the “Green Light” that drives three college* fraternity kids mad and the story of a girl driven to insanity by a date rape.

The final story makes one of the girls frantic and before you know it, the wind has blows a window out and kills one of the girls before only four of the kids escape as the cabin crashes down. They run to the edge of a cliff and then they hear a howling behind them.

The Kino Lorber release of Screams of a Winter Night includes the director’s cut of the film that runs two hours and has one more story of people being chased by a witch through a graveyard. Dimension Pictures — the people that put out Ruby, Return to Boggy Creek and Scum of the Earth — told the filmmakers that two hours was too long for the movie and that all the day-for-night footage wouldn’t show up well on drive-in screens.

This is a movie that sets up a really ominous mood from the very start. I appreciate that and love this movie because it feels like it was made by people who were excited at the prospect of creation instead of just commerce.

*This was shot at Caspari Hall, a dormitory on the campus of Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisian. Its now abandoned and said to be haunted.

Scott Jeffrey has also produced Dinosaur Hotel and Hatched, so he’s back with another low budget dinosaur adventure, Jurassic Island, which is directed by Dominic Ellis who also wrote the script with Tom Jolliffe.

After returning from a mission, special forces agent Ava (Sarah T. Cohen) discovers that her archeologist parents (Tony Goodall, Nicola Wright) have finally found the island that her grandfather had gone missing on decades ago and now, they’ve followed his lead, because they’re gone. She heads off for a rescue mission along wityh her fellow soldier/boyfriend Luke, a paleobotanist named Cassie and Tommy while renting a yacht to the island of, well, look, it’s jurassic island, so I’m not spoiler anything by telling that there are dinosaurs there, but I am spoiling things by revealing that the island also has leaches that turn people into zombies.

Don’t go in expecting quality near any other movie with jurassic in the titles and just have fun with the small budget. And hey, the poster art is pretty good. The effects, well, maybe they don’t live up to them.

This film is available on DVD and on VOD from Uncork’d Entertainment.