The Devil's Triangle

I still fondly remember a flurry of Devil's Triangle interest from my childhood during the 1970's in conjunction with the UFO / otherworldly phenomenon craze which led to such amusing cultural artifacts as IN SEARCH OF ... with Leonard Nimoy, PROJECT BLUE BOOK by Jack Webb, and various Bionic Man episodes involving ESP, space aliens, wolf boys, and Japanese soldiers who had held out since WW2. I probably encountered this TV special somewhere along the lines even if I don't specifically remember it -- the model boat footage has a familiar feel to it, and it's the kind of nonfiction G-rated harmless fluff that my folks would have allowed us 5 - 8 year olds to watch. Maybe on a Sunday night right after IN SEARCH OF ... which was weekly fare around our house.

The film is presented as a documentary about The Devil's Triangle, using stock footage, interviews with apparent survivors of ill-fated forays into the famed area of the Caribbean, a few model special effects shots, and tourist footage of the Bahamas & lower Florida. It's never boring though, with Vincent Price's deliciously voiced narration always tweaking your geek nerve whenever he allows the phrase "The Devil's Triangle" to roll off his tongue. Price's narration is priceless and in spite of the dramatic footage chosen for the special, his wording is by far the most interesting aspect of the production.

But the reason I sought this out as an adult is that it provides the only cinematic musical score credit to King Crimson, one of the great overbearing art-rock bands of the 60's/70's, 80's/90's, and still in operation today under the domineering fist of one Robert "Bob" Fripp, an accomplished guitarist, economics theorist, musical industry critic, and hero to legions of budding young musicians who have fallen sway to his mesmerizing Bournemouth spell. Fripp is the very embodiment of the rock musician as an intellectual: Short, bespeckled, usually dressed in a suit + tie since 1978 or so, he has confounded and intrigued three generations of acid eating art rockers who find his particular brand of electronic symphonics to be the best thing since sliced bread.

I count myself as part of that legion, and my favorite era of King Crimson music has always been the 1968 - 1972 Fripp With An Afro period of the band's history. After being familiar with Fripp's somewhat caustic view of the world for 25 years now it is no surprise to figure out *WHY* this particular project he may or may not have been directly involved in hasn't been an emphasized footnote from his resume. THE DEVIL'S TRIANGLE happens to be the same title as the name of a composition -- 11 minutes in length on album -- that Fripp penned for his 1970 King Crimson without Ian McDonald album "In the Wake of Poseidon" that he regards these days with some disdain. Essentially a spin off on Holst's "Mars: God of War" from the composer's "The Planets" suite (which Crimson famously covered as their show-stopper climactic number from a legendary 1969 tour of Britain & America), which was apparently so close to the original composition that Holst's estate sued Crimson for plagiarism. Or so the legend goes.

That in itself would be enough to give the always penny conscious Fripp a bellyache, but the producers of this TV special decided to use Crimson's "The Devil's Triangle" as the theme music for their movie. Mostly this amounts to the same 4 minutes or so of Mellotron heavy droning from the composition's middle segment -- we never hear it at full length, though the composition's (sic) flutey conclusion is used to good effect during the opening credits -- that most Crimsonites might be hard pressed to understand what the point of using it was. Other than cashing in on the title & using some of the music's atmospherics to add weightiness to cheaply staged model effects shots of a boat bobbing in some tank meant to represent the Caribbean Sea. And there are some anomalistic waftings of Mellotron-ish sounding noise/music here & there which just might be outtake reels from the "Poseidon" sessions, though nobody I have been able to ask seems to be able to identify them.

One pictures Fripp agreeing to allow ABC & the producers to use the section of music, depositing a royalties check, being provided with a video copy of the finished project to enjoy, and watching with resigned bemusement as the same two minutes of music are repeated over & over & over again, with Mr. Pice ominously narrating the events being depicted. It would have been the very definition of the term "underwhelming", and as such Mr. Fripp's decision not to trumpet this as the career breakthrough he had been waiting for is somewhat better understood now that I have seen it for myself. King Crimson would have been a perfect choice for a rock band to score a movie, but sadly it never happened (though Fripp & Crimson's music has been heard in a few films of exception, most notably BUFFALO '66, and "The Devil's Triangle" was also used apparently without permission in the 1970 Hong Kong snake horror epic DEVIL WOMAN) and to date this remains the only official "musical score credit" to perhaps the most cinematic thinking of all the British art rocker dinosaur gods. Curious.

The long and short of it is that if you really, really like "The Devil's Triangle" from King Crimson's "In the Wake of Poseidon", enjoy listening to Vincent Price talk, and have a thing for other worldly phenomenon studies, this movie was tailor made to your singular, unique and peculiar tastes. It's not a bad documentary either for what it's worth, coming in at under an hour in length and filled with offbeat footage, strange interviews with obscure individuals, and lots of groaning Mellotrons. You can do much worse for an hour of your time, actually.

6/10

This is a short, entertaining documentary that gets most of it's mileage from the slightly arch voice work of the great Vincent Price and from it's very silly script. You can't really take the documentary seriously because, as other reviewers have pointed out, the production values are so bad they are funny! It's an "Ed Wood style" documentary with lots of laughs. They start early when you get not one, but two openings for the film ending with Price intoning the oft-repeated line..."in...the..DEVIL'S TRIANGLE!". Then you get badly edited cuts that jump all over in time. At one point you are in the 40's with a Christmas day flight that disappears while singing Christmas Carols. Of course, the director uses a recording of a whole chorus singing while Price ominously intones that they had flown into (yes, you guessed it) "..the..DEVIL'S TRIANGLE". Another fun bit in the show is the fragmented use of music by King Crimson. I couldn't quite place the album it was pulled from, but the same piece was used over and over again along with some weird noises that sound like they came from an old Halloween record. There are also some very funny re-enactments in the film. At one point an eccentric captain of a Navy coal ship heading to South America strolls onto the deck of the ship with his hat and cane, wearing only long underwear. Later in the story we see the same actor strolling back and forth across the deck in the same long-johns! And last, but not least, there are many "artists conception" paintings of what the director thinks may have happened on board the missing ships. The paintings look like they've been drawn and colored by a 12-year old. But the real fun here is with the voice acting of Vincent Price, who pulls back from the top just enough to keep his performance from becoming camp. But he just can't resist a little exaggeration here and there, like when he is describing the people who are heading through the triangle to get to vacations spots and describes the "..unattached women who find unattached men..". He gives the lines just a hint of perversion which is very funny indeed. Oh, give this documentary a try. You will enjoy it immensely if you try to see it as an Ed Wood film. I'm voting for Guy Maddin to do the remake.

Vincent Price is the narrator of this story about the Triangle and its place in recent history (about 200 years) as a frightening area of the ocean with respect to planes and ships.

Most of the movie is ultimately spooky, albeit at times it's a bit animated. Good interviews with folks who have a connection to the Triangle, though some of them appear to have been coached. Alan Kosnar, whom was one of the naval personnel involved with the disappearance of the infamous 'Flight 19', states his version of what happened on that fateful day.

Trenchant script adds to film's flavor. Comfortably short running time at only 52 minutes

It was in released in the mid-1970s when everybody was coming out with movies trying to explain the Bermuda Triangle craze. Unlike most of those (which were mostly documentaries anyway), this one was a fictional explanation. It seems pretty straightforward in it's storytelling until the last ten minutes. It is this last ten minutes that actually frightened me. If you have the chance to see this one I'd recommend it.

Coast Guard finds a boat on an fish trip in the Bermuda Triangle with one female passenger alive an all the others dead from mysterious circumstances. One by one the mysteries of their death are explain or so it seems. This was one of the better ABC movies of the week.