Huston made one of the oddest screen appearances of his career as the lead in this gloriously goofy creature feature, an Italian-U.S. co-production made one year after Jaws by veteran horror director Ovidio G. Assonitis. Huston was joined, more bizarrely still, by Henry Fonda—as an unscrupulous deep-sea digger who accidentally incites the anger of a giant octopus—and Shelley Winters, as the wife of Huston’s upstanding journalist and the father of his son, who embarks midway through the film on what turns out to be an ill-fated children’s yacht race. “When famed author Jules Verne first introduced the giant octopus in his novels,” ran one of the movie’s promotional materials, “people laughed at his vivid imagination. This is nothing to laugh at.”