Saturday, August 4, 2018

THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE (1978) * ½


A ship disappears in the Bermuda Triangle.  John Huston’s boat comes across the only survivor, a cruddy looking doll, and of course, his daughter wants to keep it.  Soon after, the doll starts having a hankering for raw meat and crew members begin meeting untimely deaths.  

Directed by Mexican schlockmeister Rene (Guyana:  Cult of the Damned) Cardona Jr., The Bermuda Triangle is a long (nearly two hours) voyage to nowhere.  It has an admittedly brilliant set-up, at least one laugh-out-loud scene of incompetent silliness (the nightmare sequence), and one memorably WTF moment (the doll eats some birds).  However, about halfway through, the movie stops on a dime during an extended, slow-moving, and dull scuba diving scene.  From there on, it becomes an excruciating slog culminating in one of the more infuriating non-endings it’s been my displeasure to sit through in quite some time.

Probably sensing it would be hard to sustain the suspense of a boat’s disappearance for the entire running time, Cardona tosses in not only a killer doll, but also a creepy kid and an ill-advised quest for Atlantis into the mix.  Neither of these subplots do much to perk up the already interminable pacing.  While it’s fun seeing someone of John Huston’s stature wallowing in such schlocky surroundings, he doesn’t do much to elevate the film from the depths of embarrassment.  Only Hugo Stiglitz and Video Vacuum favorite Miguel Angel Fuentes are able to inject a little machismo into the proceedings.  

AKA:  The Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle.  AKA:  Devil’s Triangle of Bermuda.

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