The Bermuda Triangle AKA Il triangolo delle Bermude AKA El Triángulo diabólico de las Bermudas
(1978) 112 min.
Rated: NR (minor blood, scenes of 2 sharks being killed, several dead birds.)
Country: Italy / Mexico
Director: René Cardona Jr.
Starring: John Huston, Andrés García, Hugo Stiglitz
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
A family aboard a ship get pulled into the Bermuda Triangle.
Synopsis:
The passengers on the cruise ship Black Whale III stray near the Bermuda Triangle. They pick up a doll out of the ocean and give it to the little daughter of the captain named Diane.
Doctor Peter laments the fact that he killed a girl. Later they all discuss the legend of the Bermuda triangle.
Randomly a large group of parrots attack Diane and her doll. As the adults go to check on Diana, many of they birds lie dead on the deck with their necks broken and covered in blood. The doll has a mouth covered in what looks like blood.
Suddenly the boat is thrust the darkness and confusion of a storm. They go in the direction of another boat that supposedly disappeared over a hundred years ago. The boat begins to rock scaring the passengers.
They decide to deep-sea dive to look for Atlantis. Doctor Peter is left behind and the girl and her doll close a fridge door trapping Simon, the cook, inside the walk in fridge.
The divers harpoon a few sharks as they search for the city of Atlantis.
Peter opens the fridge door and the cook comes out.
Underneath the divers find huge pillars, but suddenly the pillars collapse due to an earthquake. One of the divers is trapped beneath. The group manage to pull the pillars off. Her legs are damaged, but she should survive if they reach shore.
A storm happens. Everyone is warned to stay in their rooms. There is a leak in the ship and the propeller has hit something. Diane wanders outside and her parents go into the storm to look for her. Her parents fall overboard and are never seen again.
Simon is found dead with his throat slit. Next Gordon threatens to destroy the doll. Of course, he is set to go underwater to fix the propeller and the propeller turns on filling the seawater with blood. Gordon blood.
As the ship tries to call for a mayday they hear their own distress call repeated to them, then the calls of another flight that was once lost in the Bermuda triangle is heard.
Some of the people take the girl with crushed legs in a boat and try to make it to shore. However, they don’t reach shore in time and the girl dies. They are adrift at sea, confused and hopeless as their boat’s motor dies.
When Doctor Peter looks for his wife, he finds just her coffee. Diane had predicted that she would die by now and the doll’s mouth is covered in blood.
The captain makes another emergency call and is received by a crew that states that the Black Whale III disappeared 12 years prior. The film ends with a scene of the doll floating in water as a list of disappeared vessels rolls like credits. Then the line “Who will be the next?” appears.
Review:
This film tries to scare the audience with the idea of the Bermuda Triangle but goes about it entirely the wrong way. It brings in a creepy doll cliche that possesses the young girl, Diane. Why would anyone fish out some garbage out of the sea and hand it over to their daughter? WHY?
The majority of the deaths are off-screen and the film lacks any of the tension it wishes it had. Diane spends most of the movie chiming in how everyone will die and in what order. No one ever suspects perhaps the doll with the bloody mouth that appears at a few death scenes has anything to do with Diane’s odd behavior or that it might be cursed. No. Everyone is too busy being complete imbeciles and in Doctor Peter’s case, smashed out of his mind. Each death inspires no response from the remaining crew and passengers.
I don’t think I would recommend this film even as laugh fodder as it’s too dull to sit through. Honestly, my memory is quite a haze of what I witnessed and I just finished watching it. It was that unmemorable.
Rifftrax version:
This movie is available as a Rifftrax purchase. The laughs are pretty sparse as the endless shots of the divers underwater and shots of ocean are pretty dull. The jokes are mostly thrown at Simon who is basically a racial stereotype black cook along with the odd dubbed cast and weird accents. References are also made to the MST3K riffed movie Pumaman and Rifftrax’d The Room.
Notes:
Miguel Ángel Fuentes who plays Gordon in this film also played Vadinho in MST3K’s episode 903: Pumaman.