The Bermuda Triangle - that area in the South Atlantic where ships, planes and people mysteriously vanish, according to legend - enjoyed its heyday in the '70s, with an endless ream of books, documentaries and television specials purporting to explore an otherworldly mystery. By 1978 the Triangle craze had largely burned out, which didn't stop Mexican hack Rene Cardona Jr. from making a movie about it. And what a movie The Bermuda Triangle (1978) is, a would-be horror flick inept in so many ways it's astounding. The yacht Black Whale III goes on a cruise into the Caribbean, with a cast of soap opera characters: a marine biologist (John Huston, bored and collecting a paycheck), a crusty captain (Hugo Stiglitz) and superstitious mate (Miguel Angel Fuentes), an alcoholic doctor (Andres Garcia) and his bitter wife (Claudine Auger), some disposable teenagers and a little girl (Gretha) who scoops up an old-fashioned doll floating through the sea. No sooner does that doll come aboard than the yacht falls victim to various phenomena: violent birds, stormy seas, sea quakes, mysterious mishaps and an encounter with Atlantean ruins. The ship's inhabitants struggle to stay alive, unsure whether to blame the doll, the girl or the supernatural forces lurking within...the Bermuda Triangle!!!
Cardona specialized in chintzy films either ripping off blockbusters (the Jaws knock-off Tintorera) or "inspired by true events" (Guyana: Cult of the Damned). Co-produced with an Italian studio, Bermuda Triangle contains elements of both: while there wasn't a big Triangle movie to rip-off, Cardona certainly had his choice of goofball documentaries (like Dick Winer's The Devil's Triangle, with its gloriously overwrought Vincent Price narration) to cull from. Cardona gooses the story with allusions to real Triangle lore: a self-contained sequence dramatizes Flight 19's disappearance, the Black Whale picks up radio transmissions from missing ships, while a final crawl adds the fictional ship to a long list of "authentic" Triangle victims. I'd call it tasteless, if anything in the Triangle phenomenon demonstrated "taste" in the first place.
When not impersonating a documentary, Triangle offers a mindboggling mishmash of bad dialogue, stock footage (including music stolen from Forbidden Planet) and inept scares. Cardona throws so much weird nonsense at us that it simply piles on top of itself, without explanation. At one point the cast is swarmed by vicious parrots (!), then a later sequence implies that the spooky doll has taken to eating the birds (!?!); how these events are connected is left to our imagination. Another interminable scene features the passengers scuba-diving for ruins connected to (where else?) Atlantis, culminating in graphic scenes of the divers shooting sharks with spear guns, their bloody death throes lovingly captured by Cardona. By the time the slow-witted heroes figure out what's happening it's too late to matter, with even the spooky doll (whose face takes on a Chucky-like visage) offering no explanation.
It's hard to blame the cast (mostly Mexican genre stalwarts, with token international stars Huston, Auger and Gloria Guida) for poor performances; few have even basic characters to grapple with, aside from tedious banter between the doctor and his wife. In any case, Triangle's international cut features possibly the worst dub job in cinema history; it sounds like three actors dubbed the entire cast, with little Diane in particular sounding like a middle-aged woman doing a baby voice. The low point is the Black cook (Jorge Zamora), who acts and sounds like Mantan Moreland's obnoxious brother, and meets a baffling end. The anachronistic racism feels of a piece with the shark murder, leering shots of Guida in a swimsuit and general incoherence; Triangle seems to be building to a climax then just ends, fizzling out in the goofiest non-conclusion since Monster a Go Go.
Filmmakers who dramatize the Bermuda Triangle run afoul of a simple fact: the mystery, which is to say the fact of the mystery, is the main draw. It's spooky to consider a patch of ocean where ships just plain vanish; for most people, it grows less interesting when you start "explaining" that mystery, whether you blame the disappearances on UFOs, Atlantis, time warps or good old-fashioned hurricanes. Perhaps then there's no good way to make The Bermuda Triangle, no satisfying explanation to offer, low budget or not; Cardona's final shots of the doll drifting in search of its next victim make as much sense as anything else.
