Director/Screenplay – Rene Cardona Jr., Adaptation – Rene Cardona Jr. & Carlos Valdemar, Photography – Leon Sanchez, Submarine Photography – Ramon Bravo, Music – Stelvio Cipriani, Special Effects – Federico Farfan. Production Company – Conacine/Filimca Re-Al, S.A..
Cast
John Huston (Edward Marvin), Carlos East (Peter Marvin), Claudine Auger (Sybil Marvin), Hugo Stiglitz (Captain Mark Briggs), Gretha (Diana Marvin), Jorge Zamona ‘Zamorita’ (Simon), Andres Garcia Jr. (Billy Marvin), Miguel Angel Fuentes (Gordon), Andreas Garcia (Alan), Gloria Guida (Michelle), Marina Vlady (Kim Marvin), Al Coster (Dave)
Plot
Edward Marvin has chartered the ship Black Whale III and sets out to sea with his wife and family, as well his brother Peter and his family. As they enter into the Bermuda Triangle, mysterious things begin to occur. Edward’s daughter Diana picks up a strange doll found floating in the water and afterwards begin to pronounce that people aboard are going to die. They encounter a ship sending out an SOS but then find it is supposed to have disappeared years ago. Those aboard then begin to die in mysterious ways.
The Bermuda Triangle is supposedly a region where ships and planes have disappeared under inexplicable circumstances. The region spans about a million square miles centred between Miami, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda, although its exact parameters have varied and been expanded so that some proponents can include other incidents inside. The term first originated in a newspaper article in 1950 speculating about the large number of ships and aircraft that had disappeared in the area. The idea was soon taken up by fringe science theorists who have offered all manner of explanations that have included everything from UFOs, timewarps and aliens to technology left over from Atlantis. However, marine experts have shown that some of the claims made of ships vanishing in mysterious circumstances have been wildly distorted or have neglected to mention that said ships were later found – and demonstrated that statistically no more vessels sink or disappear in the area that any similar area of ocean in the world. This does not appear to have stopped the popularity of the myth and there have been numerous films and tv series that have employed the Bermuda Triangle as a locale. (See Films About The Bermuda Triangle). The end credits for the film here give a lengthy list of the missing planes and ships.
Rene Cardona Jr (1939-2003) was a popular Mexican director, the son of Rene Cardona, who was also a prolific Mexican director. Rene Jr made 100 films between the 1960s and 2000s. Most of these are spy and adventure films or light comedies. Cardona had ventured into the horror genre with The Night of a Thousand Cats (1972) and in genre material also made the likes of The Gorilla Kid (1977), Beaks (1987), Playback (1989), Murderous Fury (1990) and The Man in White (1994). He gained his greatest international exposure with the killer shark film Tintorera (1977) and several films based on real-life tragedies with Guyana: Crime of the Century (1978) about the Jonestown Massacre and as writer/producer of Survive! (1977) based on the Andean plane crash where the survivors were reduced to eating their dead.
The main problem that The Bermuda Triangle is stuck with is that it is dealing with an abstract subject – how do you make a film about a wide geographic area? A title like The Bermuda Triangle is like making a film called The Atlantic Ocean or Europe – it is such a broad and diverse subject that trying to define it as a single story is limiting. Not to mention, how do you make a film about the disappearances of vessels at sea over a period of several hundred years?
John Huston as the patriarch leading an expedition into The Bermuda Triangle
Not too understandably, The Bermuda Triangle feels as though it sails aimlessly around in search of a subject. There are a couple of scenes unrelated to the main action that cut away to Air Force flights that take off and go missing. The film takes place aboard a small cruise vessel chartered by John Huston. Some time after they set out, they encounter a mystery ship at sea that is supposed to have vanished years ago and that is it in terms of missing ships. The daughter (Gretha) picks up a doll found floating in the water and afterwards gives eerie presentiments that everybody is going to die. The characters then start to die in strange ways, or disappear, although no explanation is offered of the agency behind these.
This feels more like a horror film about a haunted sea voyage – you keep being reminded of ghost ship films like Death Ship (1980) or Ghost Ship (2002). There is precious little of this that ties to The Bermuda Triangle – indeed, the film has only really co-opted this as a selling point and the film could in fact be set in any sea. The film reaches an ending that a show like The Twilight Zone (1959-63) has made into a cliché.
The top-lined names in the film are John Huston, director of classics such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The African Queen (1952) and The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and French actress Claudine Auger, a former Miss World contender and a Bond girl in Thunderball (1965). For all their name value, the film fails to make much use of either, Huston in particular.
The best scenes in the film are those where the party go scuba diving and encounters a set of underwater ruins – there is no explanation of what these are, whether they are some lost realm – before one of the women becomes trapped under a fallen pillar. These scenes are shot by Ramon Bravo, the Mexican oceanographer who also shot the underwater scenes for Cardona’s Tintorera.
The Bermuda Triangle is often confused with the identically-titled documentary The Bermuda Triangle (1979), which was released one year later. Indeed, the Wikipedia page for this film mistakenly lists the poster for the documentary instead of the one for this film.
