Good movie but grossly overrated

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

A creature is hunting off the Californian coast. Reporter Ned Turner (John Huston) recruits marine scientist Will Gleason to investigate the mysterious dead bodies. Tillie (Shelley Winters) is Ned's wife. Ned has been reporting on the tunnel construction company owned by Mr. Whitehead (Henry Fonda). The community prepares for an upcoming sailing regatta.This is trying to follow the success of Jaws. It is nowhere as good and it suffers from its obvious copycat nature. With such legendary actors, it's assumed that they would be the constant leads and a guy like Huston could take over. It's all very bland and there is nothing these actors can do to save this. The three veterans don't have possession of the screen. Screen time is scattered among nobodies and secondary characters. The giant octopus is mostly silly. There are some miniature work and a rubber creature. There is some underwater work but nothing that exciting. Same goes for the action. This is a poor attempt to grab onto a tailcoat.

I'm watching this on the COMET network right now and I'm noticing that the dialogue always leads somewhere or provides character background. There is no "filler" of stupid, pointless chatter that seems so prevalent in most new movies of this genre that I see today. And it's pretty cool to see Henry Fonda, Shelley W., Claude Akins, Bo Hopkins, etc. ALL in such a bizarre outing! ha! Very cool. This is not a bad film! Just needs more Cthulhu.

The acting, the dubbed English, the script...all lousy and somehow makes the movie watchable. There are lots of cameos and it's really fun to see these stars show up (obviously for a vacation in Italy) that make sense. But best of all...it appears they tortured some octopus by poking whale dolls at it.Beware: sort of spoiler ...Somehow it appears that cutting off an arm of an octopus kills it, But worst of all...an Octopus is attacked and there is no "ink" to be seen. They should have used ink and that would have blocked the obvious puppetry...or better yet...blocked the visuals altogether.

Something strange is happening in Ocean Beach, California. First, a small child has been snatched out of its stroller and the body is later found in the ocean having been eaten to the bone. Then a man on a boat in the harbor also goes missing and his body is found in the ocean in the same condition. Just prior to that however a company owned by a man named "Mr. Whitehead" (Henry Fonda) called "Trojan Construction" has been using machinery on the ocean bottom that emits a high-pitched frequency. But that still doesn't explain what killed the baby and the man—especially since their deaths weren't in the same location. Meanwhile, more and more bodies are being found in the same condition. Anyway, this movie is perhaps the first "clone" of the extremely successful film "Jaws" (which came out in 1975) and features some notable actors which include John Huston (as the news journalist "Ned Turner"), Shelly Winters (as Ned's sister, "Tillie Turner"), Bo Hopkins ("Will Gleason") and the aforementioned Henry Fonda. Additionally, it also had a couple of attractive actresses in Delia Boccardo (as "Vicky Gleason") and Sherry Buchanan (as Vicky's sister "Judy") along with a decent storyline. Unfortunately, none of the scenes seemed to take advantage of any of this. Perhaps it was the bad camera angles, the incoherent script or the awful ending but it all seemed like a complete mess. Below average.