OCTAMAN

d. Harry Essex (1971)

Octaman isn't a very good film in any respect, but it has a massive amount of chutzpah, not least in its ambition to make a feature length movie with virtually no budget and hardly any script. Half of what money there was must have gone on two past their best name actors: former Gulliver, Sinbad and Jack the Giant Killer, Kerwin Matthews, and Italian erstwhile ingenue Pier Angeli, who would accidentally overdose on barbiturates shortly after the production wrapped (I say ‘accidentally’, but perhaps she was trying to avoid attending the premiere).

The rest of the cash was obviously spent on the Octaman rubber suit, because we see it from every angle - and it looks pretty good: two legs, six tentacles and a dome shaped head, fiery red eyes and a hideous toothy hole for a mouth, a perennially open 'o' that looks a bit like Paul McCartney's mouth, or a cats arse.  We don’t see any obvious zips or a visible pant line (common monster costume mistakes) but we can see that the suit is in two parts, the bottom half of which is the world’s craziest and leggiest pair of green slacks.

As in most monster films, the Octaman wants revenge on the humans who have encroached on his land and ruined it (as you might surmise from the existence of a massive, land walking octopus, Octaman has been mutated by industrial pollution) but here they have also stolen two of his kids, one of which died in a bucket en route to the lab, with the other dissected alive by a local 'scientist' (he doesn't even wash his hands). What follows is a cat and mouse chase, assuming the cat is a bloke in a rubber suit who moves very, very slowly and the mice are idiots who do everything they can to continually blunder into the cat's flailing tentacles. 

Lives are lost, lives are saved, guns are cocked, shots are fired. There's a subplot about a failing circus and the two main characters are a sweet couple, middle aged people engaged to each other. After what seems like a long time, Octaman is finally shot enough to disappear back into the toxic water with an ignominious plop. Often, films like these try to finish on an ambiguous note or perhaps set the scene for a sequel, but here 'The End' appears before the ripples have even subsided, no question mark, no ellipsis, that's the end of that.