The $250,000 Monster Movie That Launched a 7-Time Oscar Winner | OCTAMAN (1971)

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Some movies are bad because the people involved didn't know what they were doing. Those are forgivable for the most part, but some movies are bad because the people involved knew exactly what they were doing. They'd literally done it before almost 20 years earlier with a bigger budget and a better monster. And they decided to just do it again anyway for a quarter million with a creature that looks like what would happen if Squidward fell into a vat of industrial adhesive and tried to fight his way out.

[00:00:28]This is that kind of bad movie. Hey guys, welcome back to the show. And on this episode, I'm going to be talking about Octoman from 1971.

[00:00:40]Not Octoman like Octopus, but Octam Man for some reason. This movie was written and directed by Harry Essex, the man who co-wrote Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954. This film is essentially a cover band tribute to his own greatest hit performed in a dive bar parking lot during a rainstorm. It stars Pier Angelie, a former Golden Globe winning MGM star and the great love of James Dean's life in what would tragically be her final role. It also features the very first professional creature suit built by a 20-year-old Rick Baker, who would go on to win seven Academy Awards for makeup effects, but who at this point in his career was handed $1,000, 6 weeks, and a dream that the director would please, please keep the monster in shadow. But the director did not keep the monster in shadow. The director shot the monster in sunlight so bright you can practically see the stitching on its kneecaps. The premise or radiation does whatever you need it to. The plot of Octaman can be summarized as follows. A team of scientists discover that radiation from underwater testing has caused octopuses in a remote Mexican river to mutate into creatures with human DNA. One of those creatures has grown into a 6'4 humanoid that kills people by hugging them with its tentacles. The scientists try and catch it and it keeps escaping and kidnapping the female lead. Eventually, someone shoots it and it falls face first into a lake where I'm guessing it dies. The end. If that sounds familiar, it's because it is the plot of Creature from the Black Lagoon. A scientific expedition arrives at a remote Latin American waterway. A humanoid amphibian stalks the crew. It becomes fixated on the lone woman. It abducts her twice. A tree is felled to cross the escape route. The creature is briefly captured, breaks free, snatches the girl again, and finally retreats into the water to die. The one major innovation Essex brings to his own formula is the radiation angle, and his understanding of radiation is creative. In the universe of this film, radiation doesn't cause cancer, cell damage, or any of the things radiation actually does. It causes octopuses to develop human cells. The hero, Dr. Rick Torres, examines a baby octopus specimen and announces with the conviction of a man reading his own Nobel acceptance speech that its cells bear a remarkable resemblance to human cells. Radiation in this movie is less a physical phenomenon and more a magical wish-ranting substance that does whatever the plot requires. It's the screenwriting equivalent of a child explaining how their toy works and saying, you know, it's it can do anything because I said so. Oh, and one more thing. These octopuses live in fresh water. Real octopuses are exclusively marine animals. They do not live in rivers.

[00:03:48]They do not live in lakes. They do not mw like kittens, which these ones do.

[00:03:54]The film doesn't care about any of that, though.

[00:03:59]The suit. $1,000 and a lifetime of regret. I need to talk about the Octavan suit. I need to talk about it the way a structural engineer needs to talk about a building that's on fire. The creature costume was built by a 20-year-old Rick Baker on his very first professional film job for a flat fee of $1,000 and a 6 week deadline. Baker didn't design it.

[00:04:21]He worked from existing sketches by an illustrator named George Bar, but he built it. And what emerged is a foam latex humanoid with a bulbous head, a mouth frozen permanently open in an expression of absolute surprise. Not because it's meant to look surprised, but because the mouth cannot close, and veiny skin that looks like a topographical map of a drainage ditch.

[00:04:43]The performer inside the suit is Reed Morgan, a 6'4 and a half former University of Kentucky basketball player, and he navigates the world through two pin holes drilled in the forehead of the mask. This means every single movement the Octoman makes in this film, every lurching step, every dramatic tentacle raise, every attempt to grab a fleeing human is being performed by a large man who can see roughly as well as someone trying to find the bathroom at 3:00 a.m. after a bender through a pair of binoculars turned backward. Baker, of course, knew all of this and reportedly begged the producers to keep the monster in shadow throughout the film. you know, brief glimpses, dark water, suggestion over revelation. The producers, however, were thrilled with what they got for a thousand bucks and did the exact opposite. The science. Harry Essex versus the laws of physics. Octaman is not a scientifically rigorous film. I understand this is like saying water is wet, but the movie's relationship with science is so aggressively adversarial that it deserves its own section. Okay, so there's a scene in this movie that involves the team trapping the Octaman inside a ring of fire. They pour gasoline in a circle, light it, and the creature is trapped. But then there's the explanation as to why it's working.

[00:06:03]The fire is burning up all the oxygen around the monster.

[00:06:09]Outdoors, there is no ceiling. There are no walls. They are standing in an open field in rural Mexico, surrounded by the entire atmosphere of planet Earth. The fire is like a foot tall. The people standing 6 ft away are breathing fine.

[00:06:24]But the octaman, a creature who has gills and can breathe underwater, gasps, staggers, and passes out from oxygen deprivation because a small campfire is using up all the air. This is the scientific equivalent of saying, "Don't stand near that scented candle. It'll create a vacuum." It's not just wrong.

[00:06:45]It's wrong in a way that suggests Harry Essex once heard someone explaining how fire works and retained roughly 4% of the information. Okay, so early in the movie, Susan gazes into the eyes of one of the baby octopus specimens, and the camera lingers on this moment. Then later when the octaman is bearing down on her, she raises her hand and psychically commands it to stop and it obeys. This power is used twice and explained zero times.

[00:07:19]No character even acknowledges it.

[00:07:22]Seriously, no one even says, "Hey, Susan, what's going on there? How did you do that?"

[00:07:29]No, it just simply exists as a fact of the universe that everyone has agreed to just not examine and ignore. Okay, so the film tells us the octaman is a recent mutation, but the film also tells us that the octaman is an ancient local legend that has been terrorizing the village for generations. These two explanations are completely incompatible. The movie is aware of this contradiction the same way a golden retriever is aware of quantum physics which is to say not at all.

[00:08:06]>> From my grandmother I have heard about these strange creatures with your permission.

[00:08:18]It's pretty good, huh? Yeah. Believe it or not, that was just freehand. Yeah.

[00:08:24]and I just sat down and started drawing going based on the descriptions of everything that I've heard and uh well I think the result speaks for itself.

[00:08:35]So yeah, you can keep that actually take it home as a souvenir. And uh also I wanted to I wanted to give you this as well.

[00:08:54]The monster as a killer, hugs, slaps, and automotive incompetence. Okay, so I bet you're all wondering how the octaman kills people. Well, his primary attack method is what I can only describe as an aggressive hug. He wraps his tentacles around a victim and squeezes until they go limp. He's not biting. He's not clawing. He's not deploying ink or venom or any of the actual weapons a real octopus possesses. He's just a very committed hugger. He is the monster movie equivalent of that ant at Thanksgiving who won't let go. There are, however, a few kills that break the mold.

[00:09:40]But the octaman's most revealing failure involves the Winnebago. At one point, it attacks the RV, but can't open the door because it has no fingers. It would be like someone trying to open a jar of pickles with oven mitts on. But then in a later scene, the team opens the Winnebago door and the Octaman is already inside. The creature that couldn't open a door handle from the outside has somehow let himself in from somewhere. How? Through what mechanism did he pick the lock with the tentacle?

[00:10:10]Did he call AAA? The movie doesn't say.

[00:10:13]The octaman is just there like a cat that's gotten into a room that you're sure you close the door to.

[00:10:21]This is actually the one moment in this film that works as a genuine gag. Not intentionally, of course, because nothing in this movie is intentionally funny, but the idea of this floppy, deadeyed monster just sitting inside of a Winnebago waiting for someone to come home is peak absurdest comedy. The pacing. Time is a flat circle of fire.

[00:10:46]Octaman is 79 minutes long, but it feels like 400. The film's pacing has a unique quality where scenes that should take 30 seconds take 5 minutes, and sequences that should build tension instead build a very strong case for checking your phone. The most egregious offender is a cave sequence near the end of the movie in which the team is sealed inside a cavern by a rock slide. They panic about air supply, which to be fair is consistent with the film's belief that oxygen is a finite resource that fires and rocks can deplete. Then they have a discussion, and then eventually they find a way out and emerge right back approximately where they started. The entire sequence, which consumes a significant chunk of the runtime, accomplishes nothing. They went in, crawled around for a while, and then came out in the same place. It's a narrative culde-sac. the plot donut.

[00:11:40]There's also just a lot of dumb stuff that happens. Like at one point they row a boat out to go fight the Octaman in its own element, which is a strategy so catastrophically stupid it deserves its own Geneva Convention clause. And there's another scene where they have the Octaman captured and simply throw a net over top of it and then act shocked when it simply gets up and removes the net. The ending. A monster falls into a lake, face first, of course. The climax of Octaman arrives with the dramatic force of someone gently placing a grocery bag down on the counter. That's kind of the best way I can describe it.

[00:12:21]You know, it just kind of happens like it's a little exciting, but not really.

[00:12:26]You know, you're just like, "Oh, what's what's going to happen here?" And then it's like, "Oh, you know, baby carrots."

[00:12:33]The octaban scoops up Susan for a second abduction, mirroring creature from the Black Lagoon's second abduction because, you know, Essex is still copying his own homework, answer for answer, and carries her towards the lake. The men pursue with guns, but won't shoot for fear of hitting Susan. Susan, however, has a small handgun, but doesn't use it when the monster is trying to abduct her for some reason. Eventually, Susan shoots the octaban, and the guys open fire. The Octtoman absorbs bullets the way a sponge absorbs water, staggers, and then does the only dignified thing left available to him. He turns around and walks into the lake and falls in face first. And that's it. There's no epilogue, no followup on the radiation contamination that's threatening the local population. No discussion of the fact that they've just confirmed the existence of a human octopus hybrid. No government response, no scientific paper.

[00:13:31]The monster face plants into the lake and everybody just stands on the shore watching.

[00:13:37]Roll credits. The movie ends the way a phone call ends when the signal drops.

[00:13:41]It doesn't conclude. It just stops as if the film ran out of money or ideas or a will to live. All three being plausible explanations given what we've watched for the previous 79 minutes. Octaman received basically no critical attention upon release. It played at drive-in movie theaters, got shuffled into TV syndication, and spent two decades collecting dust until the bad movie blogosphere of the late '90s rediscovered it. And yet, the thing that makes Octaman more than just another entry in the rubber suit graveyard is the fact that it matters historically, despite itself. On one side of this film lies the era Harry Essex helped invent 1950s radiation paranoia creature features men in monster costumes. On the other side lies the era Rick Baker would create latex transformations in An American Werewolf in London. Animatronic gorillas in King Kong. Alien prosthetics in Men in Black. Octaman sits directly on the fault line between those two eras. The past made the movie, the future made the monster, and neither side had enough resources to do the job properly. And the funny thing is, the suit is the most genuinely interesting thing about Octavan. It was terrible. It was cheap. It couldn't close its mouth.

[00:15:01]Its tentacles dragged on the ground. Its performer could only see through two pin holes. But the Octavan suit is the laral stage of one of the most decorated careers in Hollywood history. It's the cocoon from which a butterfly eventually emerged. A very ugly, very floppy, very visible Wellington bootswearing cocoon, but a cocoon nonetheless.

[00:15:26]Octaman is a movie in which a man who'd already made a classic decided to make it again, but worse. It is a movie in which legitimate talent was assembled under conditions that ensured none of them could do their best work. It is a movie in which the director's son plays an indigenous guide who carries drawings of the monster, and the drawings are better than the movie. It is a movie in which an outdoor campfire depletes the atmosphere. Psychic octopus powers are real, and the ultimate solution to a radioactive hybrid creature that threatens the future of human evolution is let it just walk into a lake and forget about it. It is, in other words, a perfect specimen of its species. A rubber suit monster movie that arrived a decade too late. Made by people who remembered the formula but forgot the magic and preserved forever in the amber of bad movie notoriety where it will remain for as long as anyone is bored enough or interested enough to press play. I want to thank all of my supporters on Buy Me a Coffee, Patreon, and my YouTube channel members. I want to thank all of you for tuning in. But that's pretty much it for this one and I'll see you all next time.

[00:16:33]has caused octopuses. Is it octopuses or octopi? Octopuses. The standard preferred English plural. Octopi.

[00:16:42]Commonly used but technically incorrect.

[00:16:45]It stems from the mistaken assumption that octopus is a Latin word which would take an i plural rather than Greek. Most dictionaries now accept it due to popular use. Octopose. The grammatically corre the grammatically correct plural.

[00:17:00]If you follow the words original Greek roots pronounced o octopades.

[00:17:07]What? Octopades.

[00:17:10]Octopades.

[00:17:13]It is rarely used in everyday conversation. Well, I guess it all depends on who you're talking to.

[00:17:24]Heat. Heat.

[00:17:49]Heat. Heat.

[00:18:12]Heat up