
If you’re feeling spiritually under the weather or generally hopeless about human existence don’t make the mistake of watching 1978’s THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE (currently FREE on TubiTV). You may think that its sloppy ineptness, super lame dubbing

Your head is sure to ache aboard the boat BLACK WHALE III as you try to decipher the relationships between all aboard. JOHN HUSTON is apparently the father and not the grandfather of the Marvin clan who

Everybody goes scuba diving and there’s some beautiful underwater photography and just as I was beginning to enjoy things, they obviously really kill two sharks that were only minding their own business. That’s not cool (what did I expect from the director of NIGHT OF 1,000 CATS?) I don’t see how this movie is worth the life of one shark, let alone two. Some giant pillars representing Atlantis (I think) begin to (endlessly) topple thanks to an undersea earthquake and crushes one of the daughters underneath. They’re able to get her back on the boat but her legs are royally mangled and they don’t get better and she mostly just wilts on a bed for the remainder of the movie while a drunken doctor wrestles with the benefits of amputation. From here things just get worse and worse as terrible storms pound away, people fall overboard, get chopped up in the propeller, randomly disappear or just fall down on shards of glass and die. All attempts to escape are absolute failures and it’s all ultimately profoundly frustrating. There’s one last moment of hope when some guys on the mainland finally receive their distress signal (spoiler alert) but that is crushed too when the person who receives the message explains that the BLACK WHALE III and the entire Marvin family were lost at sea ten years ago!!! Do you know who survives this nightmare? The doll. It’s sad, really. I almost like this movie for its relentlessly gloomy vibe. Almost.

Also, I need to shout out some respect to this crazy movie for delivering some classic KT traumafessions…
https://www.kindertrauma.com/name-that-trauma-reader-jose-on-a-haunted-bermuda-triangle-doll/
https://www.kindertrauma.com/traumafessions-reader-francisco-on-living-dolls-killer-pigs-and-a-mummy-found-in-the-sea/
btw TUBITV also offers Rene Cardona Jr’s CYCLONE (1978) which is about plane crash survivors cannibalizing each other on a lifeboat but I understand they eat a dog in that movie and so I’m not going anywhere near it. I’m very much done with this director but will give him props for often casting Andres Garcia (and Priscilla Barnes in the shark flick Tintorera).
It’s amazing, and a bit strange, how much the Bermuda Triangle myth infiltrated popular culture in the 70s. My cousins even owned a Bermuda Triangle board game from Milton Bradley (though the movie I remember best from childhood is The Bermuda Depths television film).
It was a pseudo-scientific story from American pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks that somehow traveled the world.
SDC,
We actually have the game! I had it when I was little and always wanted to play it again and John found it in his mother’s basement!
I really love THE BERMUDA DEPTHS. It’s got to be the most poetic Made-for-TV movies ever made.
Whoa, Unk, you hit the nail right on the head with your description! I, too, felt compelled to watch this endless, depressing thing until the bitter end when I knew I just should have gone to bed. Then the shark thing really pissed me off! It didn’t even make sense in the context of the story–weren’t the characters supposed to be peaceful explorers of the ocean’s wonders or some such?? Just awful!
Treecat,
Right? Those sharks were not bothering anybody. Maybe it was just one shark and they showed it twice? I dunno. The movie is seriously padded with repetitious shots. That underwater Earthquake lasted about a half hour! They showed the pilar landing on that woman about five times!
I do like the BLACK WHALE III T-shirts that the crew wear though. I want one of those.