Satan's Triangle Reviews

Perhaps I should be kinder and grade this hokum, C-list television movie for what it is, but I can’t muster up that sympathy. Satan’s Triangle is nothing you haven’t seen before, better, scarier, more believably played elsewhere, anywhere else, honestly. A little bit of the occult, a little bit supernatural, and large dose of religiosity for good measure, Satan’s Triangle can’t even manage itself as good camp.

For some odd reason, the myth of Bermuda Triangle’s supernatural occurrences was a large obsession in 70s horror, look no further than a host of other TV movies and specials with studio era stars slumming it in obscure parts. Well, here’s another one that several people, I guess with a heaping dose of nostalgia filters on, deem an underrated jewel in the sub-genre. I think they’re all misremembering what is an otherwise routine and predictably stale hour.

But praise be to Kim Novak for trying valiantly to make this all work. She said the material appealed to her for the way it dabbled in the supernatural, and her appearances in Vertigo and Bell Book and Candle already clue us into her interests in that particular subject. She’s the sole survivor of a shipwreck, and she spends the night with Doug McClure’s lieutenant who answered her ship’s SOS call recounting the horrors she’s witnessed. Then it all ends in a twist that you’ll see coming the moment a priest is introduced to the narrative.

Still, Novak’s sublime leading work makes Satan’s Triangle worth sitting through, even if nothing much else does. Her vacant stares and choked vocal deliveries in her earliest scenes work very well for a trauma survivor. Then her vacant, distant face transforming into a diabolic smile and husky laugh in the twist ending are potent and strong variations in her performance, enough to give the material a bite it otherwise lacks.