Il triangolo delle Bermude

Basically an evil doll movie on a boat. No events actually related to the "Bermuda Triangle." Totally boring and unimaginative. The girl and the doll are annoying. A couple of minutes of underwater scenes and pretty Gloria Guida for a few seconds here and there only interesting items. For curiosity only.

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!

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.

Bermuda Triangle, The (1978)

* (out of 4)

Incredibly bad film from Mexican director Rene Cardona, Jr. A family goes off to the Bermuda Triangle to see what the big deal is and guess what happens. This film tries to be mysterious and creepy but fails on both levels because the screenplay is all over the place and never really makes a bit of sense. Character enter and exit the film without any explanation and the "mystery" of the Bermuda Triangle is never resolved or even talked about much, although the film tries to play claim to a cursed doll, which causes all the problems. There's some wonderful underwater photography but this too get hampered by three real sharks being killed on the screen for no reason. John Huston, Andres Garcia, Gloria Guida and Claudine Auger star.

I stumbled upon the 1978 movie "The Bermuda Triangle" in 2021. I had never heard about the movie before. But as I had the chance to sit down and watch it, of course I did. And I must say that I was initially intrigued, because the mystery that surrounds the area of the Bermuda Triangle is very interesting in itself.

However, "The Bermuda Triangle" felt more like a series of randomly filmed segments filmed at the demand of director René Cardona Jr. As he came up with ideas as the filming progressed. There weren't really any real red thread to the course of the movie, which made for a less than mediocre movie experience actually.

Sure, the movie was showing signs of being from 1978, but it was actually sort of charming and fun to watch. The sound felt like it had been restored on the version I watched, and especially the dialogue felt like they had recorded new voice-over, because it sounded very atrocious and felt sort of out of tune with the characters on the screen.

I found little enjoyment in "The Bermuda Triangle", and it was a shame, because I had initially hoped for a bit more from the movie, truth be told.

I am rating this 1978 movie a mere three out of ten stars, mostly because the movie didn't really feel like a proper movie, but more like a random collection of filmed events put together to form a movie of sorts.