This movie had quite an impact on me when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s, watching all those made for TV horror movies emblematic of American television of that period. Like a lot of people, adults and kids alike, I was obsessed with UFOa, ESP, and The Bermuda Triangle, our collective fascination with the latter having been stoked by Charles Berlitz's best-selling 1974 book of that title. It was a pseudo-journalistic, pseudo-historical, pseudo-scientific collection of exaggerated, easily debunked, and outright invented tales of lost ships, boats, and airplanes, and the missing people who had been aboard them. Despite being near absolute BS, Berlitz's writing and storytelling was undeniably compelling and entertaining, and the book utterly enthralling.
Enter movies like Satan's Triangle, during a period of fBermuda Triangle craze in which Berlitz's book sold tens of millions of copies. The movie scared me and and kept me as enraptured as Leonard Nimoy's speculative fringe series, In Search Of. (Tangent: Nimoy's hosting a bad series is one of the reasons is casting in JJ Abrams' Fringe was so brilliant. But I digress...)
Unfortunately, upon re-viewing, Satan's Triangle is 90% plodding and pedestrian, and 10% okay ending, which, with a few hours of half-hearted effort, a pen, and a notepad, could have been attached to a much better script. The director seems bored with the task of wrenching performances from his equally bored cast of B-listers and C-listers, who, to be fair, only have that dull script to work with. To make matters worse, the score is mostly uninspired an inappropriate to a horror movie, never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity to create suspense or creepiness. It's laden with that oh-so-'70s Muzaky, flute-cursed, made-to-be-ignored, light junk jazz which was often thrown into the background behind really boring scenes of sex/romance melodrama...just like the kind we are subjected to halfway through this movie. Another hallmark of the lower end of made for TV horror fair of that era is the use of padding to try to eke out a movie-length time slot. One of the most common and most boring forms of such padding was to repeat in slow motion scenes from earlier in a movie as a character is remembering, dreaming about, or recounting the event to another character. Naturally, we must sit through that in this movie as well.
A lot of people are attached to this movie out of nostalgia, which I completely understand. I myself am attached to other movies made for American television during that time, such as The Night Stalker, The Norliss Tapes, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Sole Survivor, Dark Night of Scarecrow (from early the next decade), and even The Horror at 37,000 Feet. These movies and a host of others are in a completely different class and much more worth your time than Satan's Triangle.
Enter movies like Satan's Triangle, during a period of fBermuda Triangle craze in which Berlitz's book sold tens of millions of copies. The movie scared me and and kept me as enraptured as Leonard Nimoy's speculative fringe series, In Search Of. (Tangent: Nimoy's hosting a bad series is one of the reasons is casting in JJ Abrams' Fringe was so brilliant. But I digress...)
Unfortunately, upon re-viewing, Satan's Triangle is 90% plodding and pedestrian, and 10% okay ending, which, with a few hours of half-hearted effort, a pen, and a notepad, could have been attached to a much better script. The director seems bored with the task of wrenching performances from his equally bored cast of B-listers and C-listers, who, to be fair, only have that dull script to work with. To make matters worse, the score is mostly uninspired an inappropriate to a horror movie, never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity to create suspense or creepiness. It's laden with that oh-so-'70s Muzaky, flute-cursed, made-to-be-ignored, light junk jazz which was often thrown into the background behind really boring scenes of sex/romance melodrama...just like the kind we are subjected to halfway through this movie. Another hallmark of the lower end of made for TV horror fair of that era is the use of padding to try to eke out a movie-length time slot. One of the most common and most boring forms of such padding was to repeat in slow motion scenes from earlier in a movie as a character is remembering, dreaming about, or recounting the event to another character. Naturally, we must sit through that in this movie as well.
A lot of people are attached to this movie out of nostalgia, which I completely understand. I myself am attached to other movies made for American television during that time, such as The Night Stalker, The Norliss Tapes, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Sole Survivor, Dark Night of Scarecrow (from early the next decade), and even The Horror at 37,000 Feet. These movies and a host of others are in a completely different class and much more worth your time than Satan's Triangle.