Back in 1954, Harry Essex had written Universal’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the everyday tale of an aquatic creature that gets the hots for a human woman and goes on the rampage trying to drag her off his underwater lair. Nearly two decades later he decided to recycle the basic plot for the terrible Octaman, which he also directed. Throwing science, logic and reason to the wind, it follows a scientific expedition to a remote Mexican fishing community which stumbles upon a small, amphibious octopus, mutated by both radiation and air and water pollution. It isn’t long before a much larger, humanoid octopus turns up and starts attacking the expedition.
In fairness, Octaman doesn’t waste a lot of time in showing us the monster, an early effort by Rick Baker, and then showing it to us over and over again throughout the film. This is a mistake, as although Baker went on to much, much better things (It Lives Again (1978), An American Werewolf in London (1981), Videodrome (1983) et al), the suit in Octaman is simply laughable, a rubbery, facially immobile creature that waggles its multiple arms about in some sort of weird octopus kung fu moves. Half man, half octopus, it’s all bloody ridiculous.
Essex’s grasp of basic scientific concepts is so shoddy as to be almost jaw-dropping. We can live with absurdities like genetic mutations caused by radiation and pollution (we’d been seeing them for decades after all) but there’s one scene here that simply beggars belief. The expedition corners the Octaman and light a fire that encircles the terrified creature. One of the supposed “scientists” then suggest that the fire will suck the oxygen out of the air and render the creature unconscious – and this is outdoors remember! Unbelievable… And that’s not to mention Essex’s belief that octopuses live in fresh water. Other problems with the film range from the tedious plotting to the dreadful acting to the horribly outdated and stereotypical representation of the Mexican characters.
The monster suit is good for a few laughs here and there but even that grows tiresome very quickly. It really is an incredibly dull film, enlivened only by the odd eccentricity (a character who pronounces the word “mutant” as “mute-ant”) and the occasional athletic turn displayed by the otherwise unwieldy Octaman. Otherwise it’s plodding, derivative and cliched with a lot of tedious mucking about in a network of caves, a smattering of gore and lots of unconvincing Octaman attacks. For the most part, the film looks and feels like it was made in the mid to late 1950s and not in 1971.
The cast is mostly undistinguished. Kerwin Matthews had been in The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960) and Battle Beneath the Earth (1967) and still had The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973) and Nightmare in Blood (1977) to come and he’s perhaps the most high profile of them all. Read Morgan, a prolific TV actor with minor film roles in the likes of Time After Time (1979), Blood Beach (1980) and Back to the Future (1985) to his name, was the poor soul stuck inside the rubber monster suit. On a tragic note, the Italian actress Pier Angeli, who plays the object of Octaman’s lust, was found dead in her Beverly Hills home from an apparently accidental barbiturate overdose before production on the film was completed.
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