That great title is the main attraction of this cheerfully nonsensical
Warner Bros. farce, which mixes up a couple of bumbling police detectives,
Kelly and Dempsey (Hugh Herbert and Allen Jenkins), with a trenchcoated dame
(Vesta Vernoff) who stumbles out of the rain and into their squad car claiming
that her stepfather has been murdered at a nearby lighthouse. “He’s the
inventor of a radium ray so powerful that anyone who controls it controls the
world,” she explains with a straight face, then adds, urgently, “Every nation
is seeking it.”
Not long after their investigation begins, a host of oddball
characters arrives on the scene, including the aptly named Captain Hook (George
Rosener), a self-described “marine painter” (John Eldredge), a shipwrecked
woman (Margaret Irving), and more — all behaving strangely. There may also be a
body hanging from the rafters. The title refers to a newspaper headline describing
a “giant crime octopus” that was read aloud by a pill-popping Kelly in the
opening reel, but also to the creature that lurks near the bottom of the
lighthouse, fidgeting its tentacles, slamming doors, and assaulting the
occasional diver.
It runs just 54 minutes, and it’s obvious the film was shot
on the cheap, so there’s no point in beating up on it for its terminal
staginess, or some technical missteps. The performances are all game, and I
have to admit that I chuckled at Herbert’s incessant “woo-hoo” schtick, which
is said to have inspired those early characterizations of Daffy Duck.
What’s surprising is the mileage director William McGann
gets out of his effects budget. Those tentacles appear on screen often enough
to rouse an audience that might be getting a little sleepy, and a full-size
octopus puppet is seen in a couple of shots. Though the effect is resolutely
phony, the film is good-natured enough to encourage the viewer’s complicity in
the illusion. And McGann scores major points with a shot near the end of the
film in which the villain of the piece, finally revealed, transforms into a
hideous fiend as the camera rolls. McGann got his start as a cinematographer
(including work on Three Ages, with Buster Keaton) and later in his career
would become a special-effects specialist on films including The Big
Sleep, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, and The Fountainhead — and
earning an Oscar nomination for the 1946 film A Stolen Life, in which Bette
Davis played twin sisters.
Finally, there’s a twist ending that plays as a cheeky
parody of The Wizard of Oz — but The Wizard of Oz hadn’t even begun principal
photography when Sh! The Octopus was released. Just a weird coincidence, then —
one that’s apropos for this weird little film. (Unfortunately, it’s not
available on DVD — I caught it as part of what was apparently an octopus-movie
marathon on TCM over the weekend, courtesy of a mention from the
weird-little-film aficionados over at the Mobius Home Video Forum.) B-
Note: Since this review was written, <i>Sh! The Octopus</i> has been released on DVD-R as part of a set of “horror mysteries“ in the Warner Archive series.