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I love this film. It was written by a woman, Pat Fielder, and has an interesting feminine slant. Most, if not all, of the female characters are mothers or mother figures who must deal with the loss of a family member: there is the single-parent herione, trying to get on with her life after the death of her husband... her best friend, who is pregnant and will soon have to deal with the loss of her husband, too... the overprotective mother of the girl who dies in a scene that forecasts the opening of JAWS... the switchboard operator who is always patched in to her mother... little Sandy, who cherishes the lab bunnies and gives her pet ladybug a good motherly scolding... of course, that ladybug is just a small taste of what she'll have to encounter in the final act! Even, the Kraken is a mother figure, too, as it tries to defend the snatching of her egg! Even though the men save the day in the end, it is the women who really matter in this film.

I like how every character, no matter how minor, does or says something memorable, from the switchboard operator with the mother situation to the crotchety watchman and the morgue attendant who cools his lunch with the stiffs (how many times was this gag repeated in subsequent films?).

I have double-billed this with THE VAMPIRE (I actually caught this double-bill at a drive-in in the 70s) and IT! THE TERROR FORM BEYOND SPACE. It might also play well against another giant bug opus like THE BLACK SCORPION, or another film about a sea-spawned creature terrorizing a small community, such as THE MONSTER OF PIEDRAS BLANCAS.