Il triangolo delle Bermude

Before I forget, I'd like to point out how that John Huston's two sons in this film are dubbed in a hilariously camp way that just adds to the general weird atmosphere of this one.

The title says it all - It's a film about the Bermuda Triangle. Kind of. It takes place almost entirely on a boat called The Black Whale III, owned by explorer John Huston and filled with his relatives - his two daughters (one a small child, the other played by definitely not a small child Gloria Guida), his two, campy-voiced sons, his drunken ex-doctor brother-in-law and his put-upon wife (Claudine Auger). There's also a crew consisting of permanently rough looking Hugo Stiglitz, skipper Andres Garcia, a token black chef, and some others peeps.

Huston is out looking for a lost city, but before he finds anything, they fish a creepy doll out of the sea which is adopted by his youngest daughter. The next thing you know the daughter is asking the chef for raw meat for the doll (!), they keep receiving mayday signals from boats that vanished years before and that's just the start of the weirdness.

I had a look at the running time of this one and at nearly two hours I thought I was going to be bored. It's cheaply made and all over the place, there's random footage of shark hunting thrown in and the film is full of wooden actors, but there's a few times where the creepiness factor in this film is turned all the way up to ten. The little girl is randomly attacked by parrots and it's implied that the doll bit a few of their throats out. Worse still, some of the cutaway shots to the doll reveal the doll being played by a human child. That caught me off guard and is by far the creepiest part of the film.

And it's rated 'U'! Did anyone watch this thing? One character gets her legs crushed and we get to see it in glory close-up. Another falls onto broken glass and bleeds out, then there's the bit that had me rewinding in disbelief - a character is under the boat doing a bit of spot-welding when a propellor starts up and the guy explodes! A U, how?

This film is cheap, oddly acted at times and overlong, but i'll be damned if it didn't work for me!

Cheese and ham, uniquely baked into a mess but somehow watchable. Completely overdubbed and bizarrely so. There are two young children in this. Their overdubbed voices sound like non-actors 10 years older with English as their second language, while dictating a script they are unfamiliar with. Crazy film making. The story is simple and linear but the acting and dialogue, OMG.

The characters are dumb in this. It's strikingly obvious to most characters what the problem is but no one takes the easy step to solve it. Geeez.

This movie was poorly directed. For example, there's the scene with the pillars falling - instead of swimming away from them, or over the pillars that had already fallen, they swim in between those that haven't fallen yet, putting themselves in more danger as they fall.

Was the killing of the sharks and actual beheading the small birds necessary? I wasn't expecting to see the killing of sharks for no reason other than some kind of cruel entertainment.

Some of the acting was very bad too. Even John Huston did not perform well.

There was, however something I liked about this movie, namely Gloria Guida, who was as beautiful as any actress in the world at that time.

You have to hand it to Rene Cardona Jr.--maybe his films aren't very good, but he was always able to make them the way he wanted to in Mexico and successfully distribute them internationally (as opposed to today where most Mexican filmmakers manage maybe one acclaimed art film before they're swallowed whole by the Hollywood whale). This film seeks to exploit all the publicity surrounding the Bermuda Triangle at the time. A deep sea diver (John Huston)and his much younger wife and family sail into the Bermuda Triangle to explore some undersea ruins. Along for the ride is his bickering half-brother and sister-in-law and a superstitious crew of Mexican sailors. Strange things begin to happen. They find a creepy doll floating in the sea and give it to the youngest daughter who feeds it raw meat (which, hilariously, no one remarks on)and become possessed by it, accurately predicting the demise of various cast members. There are freak storms, bizarre accidents, and perhaps most creepy they keep hearing distress calls from the ships and planes that have disappeared over the years, including even their own transmissions.

This movie is pretty effective and has a surprising amount of character development. The cast is Cardona's usual mixture of washed-up Americans (Huston), Mexican regulars (Hugo Stiglitz and Andres Garcia) and a little delectable bikini-filler imported from Europe (Gloria Guida). Since this was marketed as a low-budget disaster movie, it is fairly family-friendly (although it's probably too violent and scary for little kids), so don't expect the usual sex and nudity from the director of "Tintorera"--in fact, this is the only movie I've seen with Gloria Guida where she does NOT take her clothes off (she spends most of the movie in bed, literally, after a diving accidentally). It is a testament to the effectiveness of this movie though that I really didn't mind. The only real negative here is the atrocious dubbing: the dubbed dialogue of the black cook, in particular, would be offensive if it wasn't so ridiculous--he comes off like a throw-back to Step'n Fetchit.

Still I would definitely recommend this. Even if it's not much of a compliment, this is definitely Rene Cardona's Jr.'s best movie.

Folks on a boat cruising around the Bermuda Triangle find an evil doll floating around in the ocean. The doll is given to a little girl on board and then a bunch of strange stuff starts happening. What a turd. John Huston must have needed money badly. It doesn't have much to say about the Bermuda Triangle, either. That's just a means to an end to get this evil doll story going. On the plus side, the bad dubbing and worse dialogue are good for laughs. There are also a few weirdos in the supporting cast who are fun. Beautiful Gloria Guida certainly gives us some nice eye candy. It's not a good movie but fans of badly-dubbed stinkers might like it more.