Cult-TV Movie Review: Satan's Triangle (1975)

“Within the last thirty years just off the east coast of the United States, more than a thousand men, women and children have vanished from the face of the Earth. No one knows how or why. This is one explanation.”

-Title Card, Satan’s Triangle (1975).

A coast guard rescue copter out of Miami flies to the dead center of the Devil’s Triangle in response to a distress call from a yacht, the Requite. Aboard the copter are pilots Lt. J. Haig (Doug McClure) and Pagnolini (Michael Conrad).

They soon find the yacht adrift in the Triangle, with the corpse of a Catholic priest, Father Martin (Alejandro Rey) swinging from the main mast. When the helicopter begins to develop engine problems, Haig decides to board the ship, and Pagnolini returns to port for repairs..

Upon exploring the dark vessel, Haig discovers more oddities. In one room, a corpse seems to be levitating in mid-air, his face frozen in terror.

The only survivor on the yacht is lovely Eva (Kim Novak), a prostitute who tells Haig her strange story. She reports that the yacht encountered Father Martin, adrift and alone.  Once the priest came aboard, however, the crew abandoned ship, leaving only the captain (Ed Lauter) and the passengers. 

Then, one at a time, the passengers -- including the man that Eva was with -- began to die horribly, and some in apparently supernatural fashion.

Haig is a non-believer, however, and refuses to believe that the Devil is at work in these waters, even though Eva warns that “there is no way off this damn boat.”

Haig is able to convince her that there is no supernatural intervention by providing logical explanations for all the deaths, even the one involving a levitation (the man is speared on a sword fish…).

Eva acquiesces, and the couple make love.

Soon, Pagnolini returns to rescue the survivors. But aboard the helicopter, J. Haig experiences his first face-to-face encounter with the Devil…

Satan’s Triangle (1975) is another one of those weird and wonderful made-for-TV movies of the 1970’s that is scarier than it has any right to be. 

Satan’s Triangle is scary beyond the meager resources that went into its making. It is scary despite the network restrictions on violence limiting filmmakers working in those years.  It remains scary, even though audiences realize the TV-movie is also, oddly, hokey.

When I study the made-for-TV film today, I assess that it works so well, in part, because of the film techniques it utilizes. 

Satan’s Triangle is in no way, shape or form a found-footage film, but nonetheless there is an almost documentary feeling to the film’s early scenes. The camera is perched in control rooms, in cockpits, and it captures all the action without much by way of dialogue or overly theatrical acting. In these early sections, artificiality is reduced.

Satan's Triangle, at first, feels more like a movie documenting the Coast Guard and a rescue mission than it does a movie about the devil. When Haig takes a rescue basket (via winch) to the deck of the stranded yacht, the camera captures it all in one long take, and water even splashes on the lens several times.  The characters don’t comment much, or talk unnecessarily, and so we are left to assess the images alone for their verisimilitude.

These moments hold up to scrutiny.

On the soundtrack, meanwhile is a weird, ubiquitous howling sound. Is it just the wind? Or is it…Satan?

The pseudo-documentary feel by director Sutton Roley changes once Haig is inside the ship; in the belly of the beast, as it were. The movie suddenly takes on a more overt (and theatrical) “haunted house” feel with dim-lighting, strange noises and odd occurrences. The appearance of the levitating body, for example, is quite shocking. 

There’s one amazing shot here in which the (levitating) face of the deceased man -- face frozen in a rictus of terror -- is perched in the foreground, and Haig and Eva are in the background. It’s a super-imposition of terror, and evil, over normality.

The movie also attempts to craft a legitimate theme, arguing rationality vs. irrationality. The script ultimately comes to explain every “supernatural” event as a factor of the natural world. The blow-back from firing a flare gun is what knocked Father Martin from the mast, and killed him.  The “levitating” man is just speared on a fish, suspended by the sword. Even the crew disappearances are explained (via speculative flashbacks.)

In short, Satan’s Triangle goes to great pains to establish that the world is not an irrational, supernatural one.  It may even convince you.

Until the bottom falls out.  

Until the movie collapses -- or perhaps ascends -- into a final scene of bizarre, utter madness. Haig finds that he has returned to the helicopter not with Eva but with the Devil.  Eva's body has been discovered on the ship with the rescuers. Instead, the pilot has brought the devil to the helicopter, in the form of Father Martin.

The Devil then attacks, and events descend deeper into chaos.  This denouement features a real dream-like, or more appropriately, nightmare-like quality.  Again, this third act functions as a very strong contrast to the almost-documentary feel of the movie’s start, and is thus doubly effective.

There are no real special effects to speak of in the finale, except an exceptionally nice stunt fall, as Haig is driven by Satan from the copter to the ocean far below. Instead of effects, the movie relies on Conrad’s ability to convey terror, and Rey’s expressive capacity to depict bug-eyed evil.

It all works perfectly.

I have peers, particularly a brother-in-law, who saw this film on ABC on January 14, 1975, and swear, to this day, that Satan’s Triangle is the most terrifying movie they’ve ever seen. Having not seen it as an impressionable child, I don’t know that I would make exactly the same claim.

Instead, I’ll just say that Satan’s Triangle, a low-budget, 74 minute made-for-TV movie, is eerily effective, and surprisingly well-made.  The film techniques save the day or at least this is "one explanation," for the movie's cult-status.

At Flashbak: Five Pop-Culture Memories of the Bermuda Triangle Craze of the Seventies

The Bermuda Triangle Craze of the mid-1970s is the subject of my latest article at Flashbak

Here's a link and url: (http://flashbak.com/five-pop-culture-memories-of-the-bermuda-triangle-craze-of-the-1970s-25668/)

"If Bigfoot was the great boogeyman of the 1970s, then the Bermuda Triangle (or sometimes Devil’s Triangle) was, perhaps, a close second.

The Bermuda Triangle is a region of the North Atlantic Ocean where many ships and planes have allegedly disappeared without a trace, for decades.  Stories of such vanishings were actually reported as early as 1950, but it was during the seventies that pop culture’s obsession with this “cursed” area of the sea really went off the scale.  This may have been because of author Charlie Berlitz’s “bestselling saga of unexplained disappearances,” The Bermuda Triangle, which was published in 1969 and re-ignited interest in the Bermuda Triangle while selling more than twenty million copies.

By the mid-point of the disco decade, the Bermuda Triangle was being used as a plot-point on kids’ TV series such as Jabberjaw (“The Bermuda Triangle Tangle”) as well on prime television.  On the latter front, Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman got into the act as well with “The Bermuda Triangle Crisis.”

Below are five pop culture memories of the Bermuda Triangle Craze of the 1970s."

Memory Bank: The Bermuda Triangle Craze of the 1970's

I’ve written here before about some of the crazy (yet wonderful...) pop-culture trends or fads of the 1970s.  In particular, I’ve looked at Bigfoot and Killer Bees.  

Today, I want to remember another weird national moment from the disco-decade: the Bermuda Triangle Craze.

As you no doubt recall, the Bermuda Triangle is an area in the North Atlantic Ocean where -- across the long decades -- many ships and planes have allegedly disappeared without a trace.  Stories of such vanishings were being reported as early as 1950, but it was during President Carter's 1970s that America’s obsession with this “cursed” area of the sea really took hold on a colossal scale.

One of the most famous stories involving the Bermuda Triangle involves the disappearance of a training mission consisting of five Avenger fighter planes in December of 1945.  To this day, the planes have not been located, and there are reports that the pilots reported “green smoke” or mist before they literally went off the radar.  If you saw Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), you'll remember that film's explanation: alien abduction in the Bermuda Triangle!

As the 1960s became the 1970s, several authors began writing about the vanishing of Flight 19 and other strange incidents in The Bermuda Triangle (like the 1881 case of the Meta).  Interest began to rise. 

In 1969, author John Spencer published a book called Limbo of the Lost.  And in 1974, two additional texts on the subject were published Richard Winer’s The Devil’s Triangle and Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle, the latter of which became a best-seller, moving over twenty-million copies world-wide.

After those successes in print, the floodgates opened in terms of visual media.  TV movies such as Satan’s Triangle (1974) starring Doug McClure and Kim Novak, and Beyond the Bermuda Triangle (1975) starring Sam Groom, Dana Plato and Fred MacMurray soon began terrifying at-home audiences.   

The most memorable and weirdest of these 1970s TV-movies, however, was likely Rankin-Bass’s The Bermuda Depths (1978), starring Connie Sellecca, Burl Ives, and Carl Weathers. The plot concerned a giant turtle, a mysterious woman from the sea named Jenny, and the Triangle itself.

Not to be outdone, several ambitious filmmakers began to produce documentaries on the subject of the Bermuda Triangle.  Sunn Classic Pictures -- the Utah outfit behind In Search of Noah's Ark (1977), The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977) and In Search of Historic Jesus (1979) -- released The Bermuda Triangle in 1979, but that was relatively late in the game, following efforts such as The Devil’s Triangle (1974), narrated by Vincent Price, and Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle (1978).

On television, the subject was all the rage as well.  An episode of the Saturday morning series Jabber Jaw -- basically Scooby Doo with a talking shark instead of a talking dog -- in 1976 aired a story called “The Bermuda Triangle Tangle.”  Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman got into the act as well with “The Bermuda Triangle Crisis.” 

Most notable of all, however, was The Fantastic Journey (1977), a short-lived sci-fi series about a group of students who plunge through a green cloud in the Bermuda Triangle and end up on an island that straddles all periods of time.  The series starred Jared Martin, Ike Eisenmann, Katie Saylor, Carl Franklin, and Roddy McDowall.

Even non-fiction programs such as Nova (“The Case of the Bermuda Triangle”) and the Leonard Nimoy-hosted In Search Of (“The Bermuda Triangle) in the 1970s featured stories about the mysterious realm where people and vehicles would disappear from the face of the Earth.

I remember from my childhood that tales of the Bermuda Triangle absolutely fascinated the hell out of me.  

It was a mystery that could have involved time travel, aliens, or even monsters.  It was a promise, implicitly, that we had not yet learned everything about the world, and that, in some dark, mysterious realms…the impossible could still exist.     I still love the idea that we haven't explored everything, and that great mysteries still require our attention.

Of course, there a million things that could explain the various Bermuda Triangle disappearances over the years in different, more science-based terms.  But isn’t the idea of a “Devil’s Triangle” a lot more fun, spooky…and downright imaginative?  

Readers, viewers and filmmakers in the 1970s certainly thought so...