The Devil’s Triangle (1974) & The Bermuda Triangle (1979)

          The Bermuda Triangle, that mysterious section of the Atlantic Ocean into which a vast number of boats and planes have inexplicably disappeared, enjoyed pop-culture prominence in the ’70s, when all things paranormal were grist for the infotainment mill. For instance, two feature-length documentaries were made about the Triangle. The first of the documentaries was a terrible hack job called The Devil’s Triangle, which would have been unwatchable had the filmmakers not hired horror-cinema legend Vincent Price to narrate. Featuring dull interview clips, utilitarian stock footage, and silly artistic renderings that look like courtroom sketches, The Devil’s Triangle offers nothing more than bland descriptions of mysterious events. (And if the promise of a score by prog-rock titans King Crimson gets your blood pumping, lower your expectations because the music is unmemorable.) Price, who does not appear on camera, does his best to infuse the florid script with creepy-crawly energy, but by the zillionth time he ends a sentence with “in the Devil’s Triangle,” the novelty has eroded. Additionally, director/co-writer Richard Winer doesn’t even bother to propose possible explanations for the Triangle phenomenon, instead forcing Price to croak cryptic crap: “What is this wrath-flinging, horrifying curse that prevails in the Devil’s Triangle? An affliction so incredible that even the United States Coast Guard is reluctant to make an observation on the matter?”

          For entertainingly outrageous answers to such questions, one must shift attention to a later film, The Bermuda Triangle, which was unleashed by the titans of fact-deficient “documentaries,” Sunn Classic Pictures. Hosted by bearish-looking Brad Crandall, who lent his melodious speaking voice and professorial visage to several Sunn Classic joints, The Bermuda Triangle is a smorgasbord of pseudoscience. In between vignettes of Crandall speaking while he walks around locations related to the Triangle mystery, like a now-closed U.S. airbase in Fort Lauderdale, the picture features re-enactments of Triangle incidents that are staged like scenes from low-budget horror movies. Flyers freak out when the sky turns green around their planes; sailors reel when ghost ships appear from strange mists; seadogs crumble when inexplicable forces cause them to shift in and out of tangible reality.

          Nearly every sensational theory about the Triangle that’s ever been put forth is depicted with the same degree of ominousness. Abandoned WWII mines destroying ships! Giant waterspouts rising from the ocean to engulf aircraft! Undersea earthquakes causing massive tidal waves! Viewers are even treated to the theory that the Triangle is related to the mythical lost kingdom of Atlantis—apparently, ancient Atlanteans created a “magnetic force crystal that harnessed the awesome power of the stars,” but the crystal’s energy activated volcanoes that consumed Atlantis; now, centuries later, the crystal rests at the bottom of the ocean, blasting laser beams that explode passing vessels. But wait—we haven’t even gotten to the part about UFOs traveling through the triangle via transdimensional gateways! Boasting better production values than most Sunn Classic cheapies (even though the special effects are laughably bad), The Bermuda Triangleis highly enjoyable by dint of sheer ridiculousness.

The Devil’s Triangle: LAME

The Bermuda Triangle: GROOVY

The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena (1976)

          More entertaining “nonfiction” silliness from the folks at Sunn Classic Pictures, The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomenais a journalistically dubious survey of various mental powers that people have claimed to possess throughout history. You name it, it’s in here: astral projection, precognition, spirits, telekinesis, and so on. Actor Raymond Burr, summoning all of his Ironside-era gravitas, hosts and narrates the picture, which comprises archival footage, dramatic re-enactments, interview snippets, and cheesy vignettes of Burr “participating” in staged experiments. This is the Sunn Classics formula in full bloom, with a barrage of unsubstantiated facts and figures thrown at the audience alongside creepy dramatic scenes right out of a low-budget horror movie.

          For example, one early scene features a woman piloting a small plane until she receives a telepathic “distress call,” at which point she diverts her plane to a highway 70 miles distant and rescues her mother from a flaming car crash. Later in the movie, a woman and her young child freak out during the seeming visit of an apparition to their home—the duo watches, terrified, as their front door appears to undulate in tune with a mysterious breathing sound. Fantastic claims are presented without skepticism, as are guest stars including famed ’70s Israeli mentalist Uri Geller (who does his signature routine of bending spoons with his mind).

          It’s hard to differentiate the genuinely unsettling exhibitions from the outright nonsense, because everything is explored with the same degree of wide-eyed intensity. At its worst, the movie features laughably loose logic. “If we continue to exist after our physical bodies die,” Burr asks at one point, “is it possible to communicate from one world to the another? One way of communicating between these two worlds is with the help of a medium, at what is popularly known as a séance.” Notice the quick shift from speculating about alternate dimensions to treating them as documented reality. Or consider this howler of a voiceover line: “The best evidence for the existence of spirits is that presented by the owners of haunted houses.” Because, of course, haunted houses are indisputably real.

          Still, as with all of Sunn Classic Pictures’ wonderfully irresponsible documentaries, the goal of The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomenais simply to catalog creepy-crawly maybes on the fringes of the known world. So, by the time the movie barrels through things like Kirlian photographs and mentalists who “psychometrize” the identities of murderers by studying objects found at murder scenes, it’s easier to go with the entertaining flow than to worry about veracity.

The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena: FUNKY

Bigfoot: Man or Beast? (1975) & The Mysterious Monsters (1976) & Manbeast! Myth or Monster? (1978)

          Notwithstanding the drive-in hit The Legend of Boggy Creek(1972), a fictional feature shamelessly marketed as a documentary, the entertaining cycle of nonfiction films exploring a certain mythical creature commenced with 1975’s Bigfoot: Man or Beast? Comprising simple reportage following Sasquatch enthusiast Robert W. Morgan as he searches the wilderness for signs of his elusive quarry, Bigfoot is rational but sluggish, mostly because Morgan lacks dynamism. Short, muscular, intense, and bald except for a jet-black goatee, Morgan affects a tough-guy persona complete with strident speeches about how the scientific community’s skepticism makes him “mad as hell.” As Bigfoot trudges along, writer-director Lawrence Crowley features interviews with people who claim to have seen creatures in the woods, plus long scenes of Morgan hiking through forests.

          Although Crowley never gooses the movie with fabricated scenes, he devotes considerable screen time to the infamous “Patterson footage” of an alleged California sighting; similarly, Crowley doesn’t challenge people who say things like, “If this footprint was faked, the person doing it had to be an absolute expert in human anatomy.” During the underwhelming climax, Morgan and TV actor Sam Melville (The Rookies) travel to a spot where a Bigfoot sighting is anticipated, but then a forest fire erupts and, according to Morgan, drives Sasquatch into another area. Convenient!

          The year after Crowley’s picture was released, the ’70s Bigfoot craze peaked. During 1976, Bigfoot was featured in a classic two-part episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, plus several movies—two of which, Harry Winer’s The Legend of Bigfoot and Ed Ragozzino’s Sasquatch, the Legend of the Bigfoot, were bogusly marketed as documentaries, Boggy Creek-style.

          Also in 1976, Mission: Impossible star Peter Graves hosted a feature-length doc titled The Mysterious Monsters. This one comes, naturally, from the titans of pseudoscientific docudrama, Sunn Classic Pictures. Essentially a filmed news report in the you-are-there vein, with Graves playing the role of an intrepid investigator, The Mysterious Monsters includes several vivid re-creations of Bigfoot sightings. Using performers in frightening Bigfoot costumes, writer-director Robert Guenette stages various spooky scenes; one vignette features a group of Boy Scouts sleeping in the woods until noises wake them, at which point the boys discover a hirsute intruder in their midst. Guenette crams a lot of data into 90 minutes, with Graves dramatically grouping eyewitness sightings, footprints, hair samples, and the like as “exhibits” proving Bigfoot’s existence. In a clever touch, Guenette grounds his argument by citing various modern discoveries that upended common beliefs (for example, the Komodo dragon), but the film’s logic strains when Guenette spends about 15 minutes “proving” the existence of the Loch Ness Monster.

          Nonetheless, the picture is so lively that it’s easy to go along for the facts-be-damned ride. At one point, Graves takes a box containing a plaster cast of a Sasqautch footprint to—well, let’s let him explain it. “I went to Peter Herkos, the world’s foremost psychic detective, at his home in Los Angeles,” Graves says, gravely. Then, once Herkos is holding the box, Graves asks: ”Can you psychometrize what is in here and tell me something about it?” So, while The Mysterious Monsters may not be defensible as journalism, it’s tremendous fun as a cheesy thriller.

          Bigfoot’s popularity continued in 1977—the creature returned to The Six Million Dollar Man and starred in his own Saturday-morning kiddie show, Bigfoot and Wildboy—but Sasquatch’s stardom began to dim in 1978, when yet another “documentary” was released. Discarding all pretense of truthfulness, Manbeast! Myth or Monster? features the usual inventory of creature sightings, framed by scenes of a narrator/host “leading” the inquiry. Considering that writer-director Nicholas Webster obviously scripted every line—the actors aren’t good enough to create verisimilitude—the movie feels pointless and tacky from start to finish. Hollywood makeup artist Rob Bottin (who later worked on John Carpenter’s The Thing) created elaborate Bigfoot costumes for vignettes of creatures hanging out in the forest, running from pursuers, and scaring those who stumble upon them. Whereas The Mysterious Monsters used this gimmick in moderation, however, Manbeast! shows its creatures far too often—so despite Webster’s low angles and moody lighting, the film somehow manages to make Bigfoot boring.

Bigfoot: Man or Beast: FUNKY

The Mysterious Monsters: GROOVY

Manbeast! Myth or Monster?: LAME

Beyond and Back (1978)

          The dubious-documentary folks at Sunn Classic Pictures strike again with this sensationalistic study of near-death experiences, which is filled with so many bogus assertions, staged reenactments, and unsupported claims that its relationship to fact is laughably remote. That said, Beyond and Back is entertaining-ish, even though it goes on far too long, and during its best moments, the movie casts a creepy spell. Beardy, bearish host Brad Crandall—a hirsute professor type with a deep, melodic voice—introduces the movie from a mist-filled graveyard, and then retires to a library from which he remarks upon various episodes. Most of the vignettes are reenactments of incidents involving everyday people who “crossed over” while they were clinically dead for brief periods.

          The depiction of this phenomenon is similar in every episode. After the person dies, the camera rises above the person to represent the perspective of an out-of-body spirit, and then bright light shoots toward the camera. Next, the camera hurtles along a tunnel, or shifts to some idyllic setting, and in many instances the subject encounters a vision of Jesus before being told their time on Earth is not yet done. In between these reenactments, Crandall shares the usual Sunn Classics brand of “facts and figures”—serious-sounding pseudoscience that’s really a lurid mix of hearsay and hogwash. In Crandall’s finest deadpan moment, he sums up a series of vignettes illustrating the last words of dying people thusly: “All these people died after having their visions, and so can tell us little.”

          Beyond and Backis more focused than the usual Sunn Classic product, since projects like The Mysterious Monsters (1976) cover multiple believe-it-or-not mysteries at once, but Beyond and Back suffers for this singularity of purpose, because the picture is padded and repetitive. Nonetheless, Beyond and Back has several engaging moments of cheesy melodrama, notably a long sequence about a WWII private’s near-death experience. The voice of the actor playing the private was unmistakably replaced with that of Hollywood leading man Richard Jordan (although Jordan is not credited), and Jordan’s emotional line readings give Beyond and Back a few moments of dramatic credibility. FYI, this movie is not to be confused with the following year’s release Beyond Death’s Door, also from Sunn Classic Pictures.

Beyond and Back: FUNKY