While watching this ancient ABC movie of the week again on Youtube, where it is available for free, by the way, on multiple channels, including ones where online folk have gone so far as to create online chiller horror theater streaming shows to preface films such as “Satan’s Triangle” as if the rest of us can’t find this shit online for free ourselves, I came across some chat which I found in retrospect perfectly encapsulated what it was like to be a child in the 1970’s. Particularly when it came to that secret world of ideas all us late-night television-watching children were exposed to. Underneath the streaming of “Satan’s Triangle” in one version, I saw a guy in the chat remark that this movie came out for him when he was in 4th grade. (For me personally, it was First grade, so I don’t remember it.) According to this guy online, everybody at school would be talking about it the next day, so the guy went to school the next day and pretended that he had seen it, just so he could be in on the next day’s schoolyard conversations. Even though, of course, his parents had sent him to bed long before the movie started at 9PM. I remember those days, you had one shot at seeing something, there was no YouTube, no VHS, no reruns on cable channels. And all the cool grown up shit on TV came on after 9PM. Monday Night Football, movies, risqué comedy, etc.
I so understand that guy’s story, you didn’t want the other kids to think your parents weren’t cool, that they wouldn’t let you watch late-night TV on grounds of moral objection. I remember walking into Kindergarten in a modified Farm house in 1973 and everyone in my class then was allowed to watch syndicated reruns of “Lost in Space” and I wasn’t, the experience was giving me FOMO vibes. Kids who were allowed to watch made-for-TV movies in the mid-1970’s had the cool life, I thought. Knowing about these movies in Elementary school was big stuff, you could hang out with the kids who are the first to be picked to play ball or the ones who would be the first to puff on a cigarette behind the building at lunch time on a dare. Once you get to Middle School, TV movies were still a talking point, but that was about the nadir of that magical portal. Once everyone gets to High School, there is too much real life shit going on in everyone’s lives to care about that fantasy shit anymore.
But being of Elementary School age in 1975 (Or Primary Grade age in educator speak) is a time of weird external imagination, especially kids who watched TV and movies and listened to a myriad of potential styles of music of the time (and I’ll give a nod to the comic book zealots as well, I know you were a thing). I remember seeing the poster and promotional materials for the infamous 1975 surreal Horror film, “The Devil’s Rain” at a theater in Charlottesville, Va and being freaked out by the sight of it at age of Seven. I realized as I was making a list of the Horror films that I planned to review for Halloween and this October that most of the movies I was considering were 1970’s Network TV Horror movies, Two from ABC, one from NBC., all bizarre and unnervingly spooky. Two of the movies I was hoping to write about take place in the same area of 70’s mythology, the Bermuda Triangle. The Triangle is up there with all the big Seventies modern supernatural legends, such as Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster and Chupacabras. In the 1970s, the Bermuda Triangle received a gaggle of attention in response to its strange record of lost ships, people and aircraft. The area stretches between three points on the Atlantic Ocean; Miami, Fl, Puerto Rico and the Island of Bermuda.
Never an industry shying away from making alarmist shlock whenever it’s on the public’s mind, US TV Networks made ludicrous campy action disaster movies involving killer Bees, killer storms, and in this case, a killer part of the Ocean. While “Satan’s Triangle” uses the trendiness of the site of the Bermuda Triangle as a backdrop, it also mixes in procedural analysis of crimes and potential deaths as if they were in an Agatha Christie crime story and then mixes that with hokey occult visuals and action. If I had seen this at age Six or Seven when it initially aired, I probably would have peed my pajamas (with the little feet in them), although seeing it now, I did enjoy the sort of Alfred Hitchcock/Rod Serling-esque explanations of some of the deaths of important characters, it gave the film an added gimmicky layer that contributed to my guilty pleasure enjoyment of this spooky picture.
The first thing that caught my eye when watching “Satan’s Triangle” was that it is advertised in the credits as being a Danny Thomas production. I only remembered Danny Thomas as a commercial pitch man for Mr Coffee and I seem to recall he was a crooner of sorts of famous love songs gone by, a la Neil Sedaka or Englebert Humperdinck. Looks like he got into the shlock TV Horror movie game. The second thing that caught my eye was the cast for this camp fest. Doug McClure? (Star of another of my favorite movies from when I was Seven years old in 1975, “The Land That Time Forgot”, based on the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs). Alejandro Rey? Ed Lauter? (You guys know Ed Lauter, sheesh.) Ralph Waite(he was the pleasant patriarch from the hit TV show, “The Waltons”.) Titos Vandis (He was the Armenian sheep herder from Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex”) Michael Conrad (The Sergeant from the criminally forgotten TV show, “Hill Street Blues”) And finally……drum roll…….Kim Novak?
For a silly trendy TV Horror movie, this is an overqualified cast, the plot is sillier than an episode of candid camera, but it had a gimmicky twist and style that works, especially in the prime time TV format. McClure and Conrad are Coast Guard Rescue Pilots who get called to a distress signal in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. They arrive to find a boat in the middle of the ocean, sailing along aimlessly with dead folks on board. When McClure as Haig, finds one survivor on board in the form of Novak, he attempts to rescue her but the basket from the Coast Guard Helicopter snaps and McClure and Novak are stuck on the boat (after quite a long precipitous fall, I might add) until morning when a new rescue attempt can be tried. You would think it would be faster to rescue a boat a couple hundred miles off the shore of Florida, but hey, it was the mid Seventies, everybody took their time then. As McClure waits on the boat with Novak, waiting for a rescue, Novak begins to painstakingly recount how everyone on board is dead, including one crew member who washed overboard and 4 more who fled at the first sight of a priest hanging onto the sheared wing of a crashed plane in the middle of the ocean.
This movie, like old episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, etc. mixes a Horror premise with morality and Seven Deadly sins-type vibes. Characters in this film not only suffer dire, grim deaths, their deaths are tied to various sins that each character who dies personifies; one character is a drunk, one’s a prostitute, one’s a sex addict, one his greedy, one is obsessed with a trophy hunt, you get the idea. when McClure arrives on the boat, after a few drinks with Novak she begins to describe to McClure how each person died. I don’t know about you, but just watching people drink on boats that aren’t going anywhere gets my tummy going. The boat was initially out on the waters for a fishing trip, involving Hal Bancroft (Waite) trying to catch a big game fish, there’s a captain on board, several peripheral hands on deck and Novak is there to inspire. While sailing and fishing, the crew spots a strange survivor, adrift in the middle of the ocean, clinging to the wing of a crashed airplane, the survivor is a Priest, played by Rey.
When the indigenous crew realizes the captain is going to bring the priest on board, they see the boarding as bad luck so they abandon ship on a lifeboat. At this point, the weather suddenly turns bad and as I am typing this I realize what I am typing reads like the preface to a shaggy dog story dirty joke. A violent sea storm beaks out eventually and one by one, people get picked off. As the body count begins to rise, Two things become true; every death is explainable by nature and physics, yet every death is also attached to human sin. The movie’s script, by William Read Woodfield, in terms of dialogue is pretty sturdy. The plot, however, feels like it could have been made up by a ten-year old telling a ghost story by flashlight at summer camp. We’re in a plot where people are being offed in the Bermuda Triangle not by aliens or ghosts or extraneous figures, but by the Devil himself. It felt like in the mid-1970’s, after the Manson Family, “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist”, literal belief in the Devil as an entity was big business, and “Satan’s Triangle” is all in on playing this up, although it feels like once the devil has shown up, what surprises are left? Who could show up that would be any worse?
There is hardly any cinematic energy that is quite like 1970’s TV Horror, it was a genre all to itself. For starters, with such tiny budgets, these movies had to have tight scripts, effects were extremely practical. The script mixes action predicated on human error and mortal sin, there’s also hints of steamy hook-ups and many more casualties. “Satan’s Triangle” is one of the best of the 70’s TV Horror flicks because it’s plot veers way off-course at a pivotal moment, like a gotcha moment from a Rod Serling written episode, The movie displays Encyclopedia Brown-level detective work amidst an occult murder plot.
Director Sutton Riley sets the movie effectively, the movie looks like we’re in the middle of in climate sea weather all film, not a moment takes place away from the ocean, with any other scenes either either taking place on a boat or a helicopter on or over the ocean. With a running time of less than 80 minutes, they get to business quickly in this picture. The movie always looks Grey outside, except at night, of course. We feel trapped on the boat with whatever is killing everybody. The film does an accurate job of creating an environment of pernicious claustrophobia , though the plot reads like an entrant in a reader’s digest contest. The varnished Brown wood everywhere on board, the faux vintage sailing gear, you can just taste the bad Chivas they are drinking, the foul smelling Marlboros they are smoking, when there is no dialogue or music, you might think you were watching a throwback Old Milwaukee Beer commercial.
A very trendy concept on the internet and cable is the idea of 31 Days of Halloween, or in other words, watching a scary movie every night in October. I believe “Satan’s Triangle” is a perfect fit for this sort of endeavor. While it’s not an A-list movie by any means, it is still surprisingly solid and engaging with good enough production values. An effect is used to simulate lightning where the whole screen goes into a negative image. Whenever lightning strikes, and this may sound trite, but the use of the lightning strikes does add a sense of supernatural tension. This is not a jump scare flick by any means, but it is creepy, the idea that your sins can kill you isn’t original, but the way this is staged, almost like a play that takes place at sea in a closed setting. A movie about the devil killing people in the middle of the ocean could be absolutely dim-witted in the wrong hands.
The music in these types of flicks is important, too much is always worse for me than too little. Composer Jerry Pate gives us minimalism with echoes and haunting little riffs that taper off into the waves. Twangy guitars and flute licks that echo into the mist. The music here is integral to setting the atmosphere as much as the negative images that represented lightning strikes. when Kim Novak is recounting to McClure what happened on the boat, the use of Pate’s intercutting music riffs with 1970’s slo-mo and blurry flashbacks adds to the unnerving aura. For a movie this simple to work, the cast was to sell this and not overreact and that’s exactly what transpires here with maybe a couple of scenes that jump over the hokey bar. The cast is really quite an efficient ensemble, with perhaps McClure and Conrad being the stiffest and least interesting characters as the two Coast Guard Rescue personnel. Everyone else is top notch, especially for a silly TV movie that aired in January, like this.
Shout out to Ed Lauter, the career sideman who has appeared in countless action flicks and dramas throughout the years, he gives another memorable ensemble performance as the captain of the boat. Without going into many of his supporting roles, he was known in the 1970’s for his role as the lead correctional officer in the savagely funny and biting sports dramedy, “The Longest Yard”. He’s also a ship’s captain one year later after making “Satan’s Triangle” in the remake of “King Kong” from 1976. He plays Ann-Margaret’s husband in “Magic” with Anthony Hopkins. (A film previously reviewed in this blog last Halloween.) His balding hairdo and everyman cynical sneer made him a perfect American character actor. He brought authenticity and believability to every role he was in, here he is ornery and obsessed with getting paid.
As the wealthy fisherman client, Waite is fantastic, mostly known for his work as the head of the family on the popular CBS family drama “The Waltons”, he is perfect as the stereotyped 70’s Southern Sportsman, complete with drinking hard liquor, smoking heaters and bitching about Women when he eats. In addition, he hires prostitutes for fishing trips. The character has tunnel vision about catching a 180-lb fish, hopefully a Swordfish or Marlin. I think it is easy to confuse him with Jim Davis, the actor who played patriarch Jack Ewing on the hit Tv show of the 1970’s, “Dallas”. Ironically, when I was looking up the cast of this movie on my phone, Google mistakenly identified Davis as being in this movie as the character played by Waite and not Waite. Your Honor, I rest my case.What was extremely effective here with these peripheral actors was their portrayal of loud, tacky Americans and they don’t break character once the terrors begin. A couple of close-up shots of the trophy fish as it is suspended in the air below deck with creepy music in the background clues us in that bad shit is about to go down. I don’t recall seeing Waite in a lot of theatrical movies, but he had a middle-aged American Male persona and look that created a spot-on performance, he and Lauter are totally valid as fishing partners.
Predominately a TV actor at the beginning of his acting career, Rey was in increasingly higher brow film work as his career went on. He’s in the extremely underrated “The Ninth Configuration” from 1980 (directed by William Peter Blatty) and he is in Director Paul Mazursky’s wonderful 1984 comedy “Moscow on the Hudson”. Here, Rey plays a mysterious dishelved priest, he looks like a brooding Latino Robert Conrad. Rey displays quite a range here, he goes from faith-infused stoicism to over the edge intensity. When he first appears on screen, I thought it was Jaimie Farr for a minute. Rey’s character is given plenty of hammy dialogue but somehow sticks the landing every time. He has a couple of scenes to chew the scenery and does not disappoint. What amuses me is that when I first saw him in this, I immediately assumed that he was initially a big-time Foreign Film actor whoring himself out to do American TV trash, in reality it looks like the opposite is true, that his roles became more prestigious as he got older, not less.
Which brings me to the best performance in the movie, the one that makes the film truly memorable when on the surface it would seem to have no rights to do so and I am not sure why any of this comes with an ounce of surprise for me. When I first viewed this, one of my initial thoughts when reading the credits was “What the fuck is Kim Novak doing in this movie?” After a few minutes on screen, I realized the answer; she was dominating without even trying, as always. As fun and well done as the rest of this is, Novak takes silly dialogue and makes it cryptic, she makes stares into the camera last ten minutes in your mind, she makes alone time on screen seem sexy without her really seeming to try. There are a couple of half-nude scenes with her in this that must’ve seemed like softcore to Seven-year olds I knew in 1975. She was 20 years past appearing in “Picnic” by this time, but still looked timelessly spectacular. Her ability to take control of the movie through her well-paced delivery and soothing vocal timbre is recognizable; Novak is the movie’s story teller……and a compelling one at that.
Novak is on screen quite a bit here and out paces a very dryly written part that other TV actresses of the era would have overplayed and telegraphed, but not Novak, she was a fantastic combination of cool and controlled chaos on screen. I think modern day actress Charlize Therron attempts to channel Novak’s look and mannerisms onscreen in certain films. Same for 1980’s actress Cathy Moriarity. It did surprise me that Novak appeared to take this role so seriously. She is engaging and it feels so sincere even though this is on the surface a cheesy TV Horror film with a plot out of an edition of World Weekly News. This is the Woman that appeared in at least one movie that film critics around the world and across generations hail as perhaps being one of the ten best films ever made (including me) in “Vertigo” and she’s giving a dazzling turn in a Tuesday Network B-movie of the week that barely anybody older than Elementary School age then remembers, but that is just a testament to Novak’s professionalism and it’s a treasure that we can find stuff like this and enjoy it 50 years later.
There are some movies you can watch with friends and cheer and talk at Halloween, there are some you watch by yourself at One in the morning when you are trying to get to sleep and the wind outside is starting to howl and the temperature is starting to drop and little animals and insects are seeking refuge in your house, seeking shelter. This movie is the latter type, it’s quiet, it’s spooky, a smooth sedative like an old Night Stalker episode, with dark lighting, slo-mo action scenes, varnished Brown wood rooms everywhere, music with haunting repetition and baby electronic sounds. This was an obvious movie, meant for viewing by grown-ups who stayed awake past 9 PM on school nights, but most educated folks would scoff at watching this kind of trash, kids and teen were the ones to obsess over fare like this because they weren’t supposed to want to watch it.This is the kind of movie the babysitter would watch.This kind of unspoken taboo made it must see viewing. However, kids like me thought we were getting insight into the world of adults and we were, albeit just the world of the vacuous ones. I would recommend this movie to adults in their fifties and sixties now who were kids then, for this movie will truly speak to their inner child, the one that didn’t get to see it the first time because it was on past their bedtime.
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