The Bermuda Triangle (1979)
Production Company: Schick Sunn Classics
Producers: James L. Conway, Charles E. Sellier Jr.
Director: Richard Friedenberg
Screenplay: Stephen Lord, based on the book by Charles Berlitz
Cinematographer: Henning Schellerup
Editor: John F. Link
Music: John Cameron
Art Director: Charles C. Bennett
Sound Editor: Jim Bryan
Length: 93 mins
Cast: Brad Crandall (Narrator), Fritz Lieber (Chavez), Harriet Medin (Frau Meise), Glenn Morshower (Gallivan), Warren Vanders (Captain Don Henry), Thalmus Rasulala (Coast Guard Officer), Vince Davis (Kasnar), David Ellzey (Gruebel), Steve Farrell (Wirshing), Tony Frank (Hicks), Ed Fry (Stivers), John William Galt (Peterson), Warren Munson (Carpenter), Albert Hall (Co-Pilot Flight 737), Anne Galvan (Flight Controller, Flight 727), Bobbie Faye Ferguson (Stewardess on Flight 727), Warren J. Kemmerling (Captain, Ellen Austin), Tommy G Kendrick (Radioman Scully).
I recently dug out an old scrapbook that's been gathering dust for years. It contains quite a few old ad matts, pulled from magazines in the 1970s and early 80s. Once in a while I'll pull out a page featuring a more obscure movie and see what I can discover.
The Bermuda Triangle is not to be confused with René Cardona's 1978 Mexican/Italian production of the same name, starring John Huston (aka Devil's Triangle of Bermuda, and The Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle), this was a dramatized documentary of the 1974 book by Charles Berlitz (head of the language teaching empire), which sold over 20 million copies in 30 languages.
Sunn Classics, part of the Schick razor corporation, was a production company and distributor who developed a highly successful blanket marketing approach: Purchase, or publish, best-seller on sensational subject/make low-budget film/soak market in advertising/count money. Other titles include: The Outer Space Connection (1975), In Search of Noah's Ark (1976), and The Mysterious Monsters (1976).
Their initial success was founded on The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1974), also directed by Richard Friedenberg who went on to a successful career as a screenwriter with Dying Young (1991), and received an Oscar nomination for A River Runs Through It (1992). After turning that into a successful TV series, Sunn produced or distributed a string of "unexplained mysteries" documentaries, before branching out into fiction films, with Hanger 18, and bigger budget fare like Uncommon Valor and Cujo (both 1983). They were purchased by the Taft Corporation (who produced 1981's The Boogens), but wound down by the mid-to-late 1980s. The name still exists, and the current owners (including Lang Elliot, founder of Tristar Pictures) have plans for a slate of new movies, and an ambitious $500M studio theme park.
Screenwriter Stephen Lord wrote "Keeper of the Purple Twilight" (1964) one of the finer episodes of "Outer Limits", as well as "Demon in Lace" (1975) for "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" and a 1982 TV adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher, with Martin Landau, also for Sunn Classics. He is often credited as writer of the Cardona movie, but my guess is this stems from an IMdB snafu.
Cinematographer Henning Schellerup, started out as a director and camera operator in softcore sex films (Convicts' Women, Trader Hornee), before moving onto a successful first and second unit career on films such as Death Race 2000 (1975), Cannonball! (1976), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), and Maniac Cop (1988), and as a director for Sunn (a 1978 TV version of The Time Machine, and a 1980 Legend of Sleepy Hollow, starring Jeff Goldblum), and their offshoots, Grizzly Adams Productions and Sun-PKO.
The film is narrated by Brad Crandall, a former WNBC New York talk-radio host, who also handled voiceover on the companion feature Encounter with Disaster (1979) and several other Sunn features, as well as Kenneth Johnson's Universal TV series "Cliffhangers: The Curse of Dracula" (1979).
The surprisingly large cast features Harriet Medin, who had an early career in Italian shockers such as The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962), Black Sabbath (1963), and The Whip and the Body (1963), and played resistance leader Thomasina Paine in Death Race 2000 (1975), Thalmus Rasulala who was the doctor in Blacula (1972), and the Police Commissioner in New Jack City (1991), and a young Glenn Morshower, who as Agent Aaron Pierce, is the only actor, apart from Keifer Sutherland, to appear in every season of "24".
More unusual is the appearance of Fritz Leiber, author of Conjure Wife, made three times as Weird Woman (1944), Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn!, 1962), and Witches' Brew (aka Witch Witch Is Which?, 1980), and about to be adapted again by director Billy Ray (Shattered Glass). The son of two Shakespearean actors, Leiber had acted before as far back as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), alongside his father, and appeared in Jack Woods' Equinox (1970), a film notable for effects work by Dennis Muren (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds), David Allen (Q: The Winged Serpent), and Jim Danforth (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth).
Bermuda Triangle went out on a double bill with Encounter with Disaster, another Sunn Classic piece, this time a collection of disaster footage, directed by Charles E Sellier, Jr (producer on Triangle), who wrote the novel Grizzly Adams was based upon, and later directed Silent Night, Deadly Night. Sellier was a devout Christian and unwittingly created one of the most controversial slasher films of the 80s (at least with enraged parents and Siskel and Ebert), in which an axe murdering Santa Claus attacks a Catholic orphanage.
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