THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE (1979)
Article 5018 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-14-2015
Directed by Richard Friedenberg
Featuring Brad Crandall, Donald Albee, Lin Berlitz
Country: USA
What it is: Documentary

Stories about strange disappearances and sightings in the area known as the Bermuda Triangle are reenacted.

What sets this one apart amid the rash of documentaries/pseudodocumentaries about various phenomena from the 1970s is that this one primarily uses the technique of reenactments of the stories being told. I will give this much credit to this technique; in comparison to just having the stories told to us, it is much more entertaining. Notice I said “entertaining”, not “convincing”. If anything, it makes the stories less convincing; when a UFO sighting in which the story talks about “strange lights in the skies” gets translated visually as a clearly delineated flying saucer shooting rays out from its underside, the viewer’s reaction is much more likely to reject the whole story outright. Plus, when you’re bombarded with theories such as “portals from other dimensions”, “flying saucers with death rays”, “time warps” and (my favorite) “antigravity rays from lost Atlantis”, it’s very easy for your skeptic meter to fly off the chart. Once again, I’m no expert on the Bermuda Triangle or the accounts of events that took place there; I just watch movies. All I can say is that this movie was one of the more entertaining of its type that I’ve seen, while perhaps making me even less inclined to believe the stories than I might otherwise be.