O Triângulo do Diabo

Edward (John Huston...yes, that John Huston) charters the Black Whale III to take his family out to some Caribbean waters to search for what he believes is a sunken city. Naturally, they pass into the Bermuda Triangle and strange stuff starts happening (can you guess which actor disappears first, paycheck clenched tightly in hand?). It is up to Capt. Briggs (Hugo Stiglitz) to get everyone to safety. René Cardona Jr. was certainly getting his water freak on during this time period (this, TINTORERA, CYCLONE). The film is slim on thrills but somehow watchable. Cardona throws about every horror cliché at the screen and the crux of the plot rests on a young girl fishing a possessed doll (that may or may not be an old Triangle victim...don't ask) out of the ocean in order for the mayhem to start an hour in. He then throws in some other Triangle incidents randomly like some planes that go missing. There is also some nice underwater footage but Cardona ruins it all with some unnecessary real footage of two sharks being killed. Ugh. On a side note, did something drastically go wrong in John Huston's personal life in 1977? Divorce? Health bills? Loan sharks? Something? Because I can't explain his starring roles that year in this, TENTACLES, and Umberto Lenzi's BATTLE FORCE. We're talking three years removed from CHINATOWN here folks.

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.

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.

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!