JoeB131
This movie was a throwback to the old 1950's rubber suit monster films, but it doesn't really work here.The monster, per se, is shown in full in the first five minutes of the film, and rule one of monster movies is you don't reveal your monster until the climax.So the presence of radiation creates an Octoman- Half Man, Half Octopus, leaving you to your imagination of how that act of conception happened. Except maybe it wasn't, since they implied the creature has been terrorizing the bad racist stereotypes who live in this village for decades. Oh, well, whatever.There's some over the top 1970's vintage gore and some terrible acting with dubbed dialog, and the monster is quite comical to look at. It doesn't really rise to "So bad it's good" status, though. So I'll give it a one.
tommyknobnocker
Move over Mega-sharks and Octopussies, there's a new deep sea threat that will shame you all.The year was 1971 and future Oscar winning makeup man Rick Baker had apparently made his first costume. With the costume and $20 in the budget, he managed to fashion "Octaman." Somehow they managed to talk Kerwin Mathews into appearing in this golden turkey, surrounding him with one of the worst casts I've ever seen.Not that this movie is worthless. There were numerous times when I thought I detected a hint of humor, even though this might have been unintentional. It's still funny stuff.The story takes place in a jungle somewhere. Apparently, it's a jungle that is accessible by RV and spotted with pine trees. It's also a jungle with plenty of lakes.Because of atomic radiation, the water is full of little plastic octopuses that scream when you capture them. There's a big brother octopus too who likes to come to their rescue and smack scientists around with his two operational tentacles.Rick Baker's costume is the big draw but it's shown so often that it becomes a joke. We're often treated to seeing the "feet" of the creature, because it walks upright for some reason. The boots are obvious and you can see where the suckers were glued on the legs of the costume.All this adds to the film's crazy charm. If you like bad monster movies, then this will be one for you.
Coventry
With "Octaman", my buddy and I were pretty much convinced to have stumbled upon the ultimate bad movie! This initially looked like brilliantly bad entertainment with a horrendously inefficient environmental message and some of the most pitiable and cheesy costumes we would ever have seen. Well, it's bad all right
but not necessarily in the entertaining way that we were anticipating. "Octaman" is a long lost relative of the wonderful Creature of the Black Lagoon"; a half man and half sea serpent monster with a ludicrous head and six tentacles. There isn't much of a plot to describe, but writer/director Harry Essex (co-writer of the original aforementioned classic – believe it or not) does his very best to show off with the rubber suit as much as possible. Octaman is literally always luring from behind a bush or with the top of his dumb head sneakily emerging from the water. The continuity in this film is far lost, the characters (supposedly another scientific expedition) are lame wooden stereotypes and the screenplay takes itself way too seriously. There isn't any attempt to insert any humor, unless you think it's hilarious that the Octaman is credited as "himself". When the monster kidnaps the girl and flees towards the water whilst holding her, the image suspiciously looks a lot like that legendary poster of "This Island Earth", with Faith Domergue in the arms of big-headed alien. This proves all the more that "Octaman" got made and released approximately fifteen years overdue. At heart, this is a genuine 50's movie, but in the 70's it doesn't even qualify as a half-decent homage and ends up being a wacky and boring film.
GroovyDoom
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.
AD
