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.
