Bermude: la fossa maledetta

It's one of the least well-known Jaws rip-offs that failed at the European and American boxoffice and with a good reason . The Shark's Cave, also known in English as Cave of the Sharks or simply Shark Cave, or original title : Bermude: la fossa maledetta deals with Andres Montoya (Andrés García) , he's a diver who disappeared at sea months ago and has been presumed dead when he unexpectedly washes up on a beach alive but not terribly well . Suffering insomnia and with no sign of his ship or the rest of his crew , he's confined to hospital only to later emerge to find that his own brother Ricardo (Máximo Valverde) has been putting moves on his woman (Janet Agren) . Andrés and his colleague are hired by Mr. Jackson (Arthur Kennedy) in agreeing to help salvage an aircraft and to recover some valuables from the airplane that went down in the Bermuda Triangle . Andres joins his brother Ricardo (Maximo Valverde) and their friend Enrique (Pino Colizzi) only to discover a cave full of immobile sharks , something that goes against nature itself. Furthermore , discovering a mysterious underwater civilisation that can psychically control sharks , perhaps by means of telepathy ... Explore one of the greatest mysteries of all time! .What strange forces are at work here ?. Over a thousand people and hundreds of ships and planes have vanished from the face of the earth ...

This disconcerting story turns out to be very muddled , the acting extremely flat and the dialogue barely even functional .This strange film has a lot of messy trappings : a vanishing aircraft , disappearing ships , cockfights , a bit of touristy larking about in boats, in markets and in casinos accompanied by maddeningly jaunty music and including a weird discovery a race of underwater beings that are controlling the sharks . Ricci and his co-writers Fernando Galiana and Mauricio Melchiorre , follow the enduring mystery of the Bermuda Triangle and the similar movie : Devil's Triangle of Bermuda (1978) by René Cardona Jr with John Huston , Andrés García , Hugo Stiglitz , Gloria Guida , a really dismal film , but even adding other bizarre elements , along with Jaws (1975) knock offs . The end results to be a typically bleak late 70s denouement and brings the picture to a close with more questions raised than answered. Some of the ideas swirling around in this mess , particularly that of a cave full of motionless sharks that are controllated by a fantastic civilization aren't particularly bad ones ; however , being ridiculously developed . Stars the real-life scuba instructor turned macho actor , the Mexican Andrés García as the hero who has to face not only human treachery but also the mysterious powers of an underwater civilization , Janet Agren who Ricci also conned into being in his film Panic and the Spanish playboy Maximo Valverde . And special mention for Cinzia Monreale who played Joe D'amato Buio Omega , Fulci's Beyond, I guerrieri dell'anno 2072/Rome 2033 - The Fighter Centurions (1984) and Argento's La sindrome di Stendhal/The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) , here showing up as a mysterious girl, something she did so well in Fulci's The Beyond , as she appears in a group of people who sit around and listen to a guy play guitar and sing , then she takes her weird doll and throws it into the ocean, where she disappears and blood flows from the doll.

Stelvio Cipriani's soundtrack results to be anticlimatic and unappropriated by means of a series of annoying synthesized bleeps , whooshes and bloops . The motion picture was badly paced and lousily directed by Tonino Ricci , as the scale models effects are dreadful, as Ricci never able to conceal the fact that the ships and planes are mostly "performed" by miniatures . Spanish/Italian producers got a real flop at the boxoffice in this terrible production , in fact it was never legitimately released on DVD and blu-ray , that's why they needed a more skilled director than the ham-fisted Ricci to make them work . Tonino Ricci is one of the less lauded of Italian exploitation film directors and with a good cause . Frequently hiding behind the pseudonym Anthony Richmond his films were largely third-rate and that's being charitable , realizing additions to whatever genre was popular at the time , such as : Spaghetti Western , Euro-terror , Macaroni combat , among others . He worked as direction assistant to Lucio Fulci , bu the latter was a million times better than Ricci who was his assistant on the White Fang movies . His friendly work included the shoddy likes of Encounters in the Deep (1979), Bakterion/Panic (1982) , Thor il conquistatore/Thor the Conqueror (1983) and the Mad Max clones as Rush/Rush the Assassin (1983) and Rage - Fuoco incrociato (1984). Director Tonino Ricci must have loved the ocean, because he also made other films shot in maritime settings , such as Encounters in the Deep and Night of the Sharks. Rating : 3.5/10. Below average .

This is one strange shark movie. It's basically a movie about some kind of superior underwater race who for unknown reasons uses mind controlled sharks and the Bermuda triangle to kidnap fishermen... or something like that, I've seen it twice and still ain't sure. Although long parts of the movie is pretty dull (the Italians never seem to get the dramatic part working, but who cares?), parts of it has a surreal feel and is actually pretty damn scary. The ultra low budget really shows in the action scenes. Cardboard boats sinking in an aquarium gets to symbolize the Bermuda triangles devastating force, and there's even a cardboard sunken city. Hey, it works for me. There's one fantastic scene in the movie - it will haunt me forever: A bunch of people hang out at a yacht and a bearded guy sets the mood by playing a creepy song on his acoustic guitar. It goes something like "The sun is shining - on the beautiful ocean". A girl is walking around with a deformed doll in her hand. For no reason at all she suddenly throws the doll in the sea and then jumps after it. People start throwing themselves in the sea, one by one, and for no given reason. Blood starts coming out of the deformed doll and sharks appear, but they never attack...

Shark's Cave tries to be a Jaws clone with a twist (it even copies the "dead-guy-popping-out-of-the-sunken-ship" - scene from Spielberg's masterpiece), but ends up being something completely different: a solid work of Italian madness. To this day, it remains director Tonino Ricci's only decent effort; he's bad even by Italian standards. Well, Shark's Cave must have done something right - against better judgment I've just started my search for his 1987 follow-up: Night of The Sharks...

Italian director Tonino Ricci's CAVE OF THE SHARKS seems like a JAWS-clone by the title, but most of the sharks here can't move, hypnotically inactive on the sea floor as Stelvio Cipriani's eerie music almost hits its haunting peak...

Only getting weirder in a scene where a group of suddenly possessed young boaters passively jump into the ocean along with a floating, blood-vomiting doll, making SHARKS more a freakish underwater hybrid of THE DEEP, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and THE EXORCIST...

And it's also a treasure-seeking crime thriller, occurring mostly above water where imported American veteran Arthur Kennedy seeks a lucrative black box from an airplane that crashed since, after all, the original titled BERMUDE: LA FOSSA MELEDETTA involves the famously enigmatic Bermuda Triangle...

Where Spanish actor Andrés García, starring in this Mexican-shot Italian-backed production, had originally vanished and then reappeared, reunited with the director's future NIGHT OF THE SHARKS ingenue Janet Agren, busy in a rather complicated cuckolding romance...

So when those sharks wake up and finally become deadly, there's only ten minutes left in an oceanic fantasy with just about every offbeat exploitation genre covered, and then some.

Bermuda: Cave of the Sharks is just one of many Italian shark-themed movies to follow in the wake of Jaws, but I wouldn't class it as a rip-off of Spielberg's film; I certainly wouldn't call it a horror. In fact, I'm not sure how to label the film, as it spans several genres, including crime, thriller, adventure, and sci-fi/fantasy. It doesn't do any of them very well.

Andrés García plays diver Andres Montoya, who, together with his friend Enrique (Pino Colizzi), is hired by criminal Mr. Jackson (Arthur Kennedy) to salvage a box from a plane that has crashed somewhere in the Bermuda triangle. The men successfully locate the box, but they also find a mysterious cave guarded by sharks, which may hold the key to unlocking Andres's amnesia.

Directed with little energy by Tonino Ricci, shoddily edited and boasting some of the most laughable miniature effects shots I have ever seen (the airplane scene is terrible), the film is a failure on almost every level. The story is all over the place, the film never more baffling than when a group of young people on a boat - who we haven't been introduced to - jump into the sea and drown (one of them definitely deserves his watery fate for singing a truly terrible song to his friends).

Only in the final five minutes or so does the film provide anything else of note, as Andres's girlfriend Angelica (Janet Agren) dives to the cave, with the double-crossing Mr. Jackson sending his henchmen in hot pursuit. Andres rescues Angelica by shooting the other divers and feeding them to the sharks, resulting in shredded torsos and severed limbs; unfortunately for Andres, he isn't fast enough out of the water and has his leg torn off before disappearing under the waves.

We never learn what is in the box or the secret of the cave (although we do get to see the silhouette of some strange being - possibly Dipsy from the Teletubbies).

I have watched this movie when I was pretty young - about the age of 10 or so. Back then I was pretty fascinated with divers, sunken treasures, sharks. Although I was very scared of supernatural phenomenons, such as the stories I have heard of the Bermuda Triangle, I felt compelled to learn what I could of the subject. I was also terrified of sharks - possibly due to viewing Jaws, and another movie called "The Last Shark", where the gore gave me real nightmares. But still, I felt drawn to such films, I don't know; call it masochism. Thus, it was no exception that I rented this movie from the local VHS store and watched it with my younger brother and our babysitter in a night when our parents went out. This movie was damn scary and gave me nightmares I remember to this day: The strange doll the small girl had which sprouted blood from its mouth, the scene which a rather modern ship is desperately trying to menouver a whirlpool in the triangle, and the scene which a shark chews the leg of one of the heroes....... This last scene made me so scared that my nerves yielded and I was forced to stop the tape from running......without knowing the end of the movie...... I never stopped thinking about this movie and how it ended, and I never forgave myself for not watching it to the end - mainly because I couldn't find this movie anywhere else when I grew old and felt ready to face the horrors which once shook me when I viewed it as a child.