Cyclone (1978)

          Mexican B-movie helmer René Cardona Jr. hit some kind of personal-best record when he concocted Cyclone, which mashes together cannibalism, natural disasters, and sharks. Why stop with just one lurid element when three would be better? The funny thing is that while most of Cyclone is inept and schlocky, with poorly dubbed English-language dialogue and nonexistent characterizations, several sequences are genuinely unsettling. By relying on the old Lifeboat device of trapping people aboard a vessel that’s floating in the ocean with no hope of rescue, Cardona evokes feelings of claustrophobia, despair, horror, and paranoia. Alas, like the waves of nausea that afflict some of the characters, these moments of emotional truth pass quickly, allowing the movie to settle back into its rut of sensationalistic drudgery. Notwithstanding the film’s title, Cyclone gets the whole business of a vicious tropical storm over with rather quickly. In the first 10 minutes, viewers are introduced to folks on a fishing vessel, a glass-bottom tourist boat, and a plane. Then comes the storm, which is depicted with bargain-basement FX and grainy stock footage, so by 20 minutes into the 100-minute movie, the cyclone is over.

          After a few twists of fate, all of the survivors end up on the glass-bottom boat, and they endure excruciating hunger until killing and eating the scruffy little dog whom one of the passengers regards as her surrogate child. That sequence is tough to watch. After consuming the dog, it’s a short leap for the survivors to consume human flesh once people on the boat begin dying. Sharks hit the scene a bit later, and rest assured Cardona manufactures a feeding-frenzy sequence that’s just as half-assed as the aquatic horror in his previous opus, Tintorera: Killer Shark (1977). Although the characters in Cyclone are largely interchangeable, some notable actors appear, including Carroll Baker, Arthur Kennedy, and Lionel Stander, as well as Mexploitation fave Hugo Stiglitz. As a final note, Cardona and his team demonstrate their usual penny-pinching approach to musical scoring in Cyclone, because the exact same ominous music cue gets played every 10 minutes or so. In other words, if you watch the movie and feel like you’re stuck on a loop, the repetitive and slow-moving narrative isn’t the only reason why.

Cyclone: FUNKY

Tintorera (1977)

Mexican shlockmeister René Cardona Jr. strikes again with this lurid Jaws rip-off about a mammoth tiger shark preying upon sexy singles near a Mexican beach resort. The movie is abysmal, of course, but Tintorera delivers the goods in three respects—it’s gory as hell, the production values are better than one normally expects from Cardona, and there’s an enormous amount of nudity. Cheap thrills aside, however, Tintorera is a painful to watch because of the stupidity on display both in front of and behind the camera. The characterizations range from nonexistent to superficial; the story is a muddled blend of horror and melodrama; the picture features several distasteful scenes of real animals being killed; and the dialogue is marred by bad acting, ghastly writing, and (for actors not native to English) sloppy dubbing. The narrative revolves around two Mexican studs, Miguel (Andrés García) and Steven (Hugo Stiglitz), who make their living as shark hunters near a resort. The studs hook up with a sexy British tourist, Gabriella (Susan George), for an idyllic period of hookups and threesomes. Tintorera is basically just a compendium of scenes featuring attractive people screwing, stripping, and swimming, and once in a while the shark shows up for a snack. Further, it seems as if the studs are the only people who get the idea of fighting back, even though the shark’s body count is astronomical. The vibe of Tintorera is weirdly lackadaisical, although the intensity of the gore occasionally demands attention; scenes of a shark with someone’s head in its teeth, and of the dismembered lower half of a human body floating to the bottom of the ocean, are particularly realistic. Yet the kills aren’t the least bit scary, especially because Cardona employs a ridiculous device of playing heavy breathing on the soundtrack whenever the shark approaches a victim. Huh? Still, for those who care about such things, the movie’s eye-candy quotient is significant, with starlets Priscilla Barnes, George, and especially Fiona Lewis generously sharing their physical gifts. Even the actors playing the studs get into the exhibitionist act.

Tintorera: LAME

Guyana: Cult of the Damned (1979)

          The first of two ripped-from-the-headlines dramatizations about the Jonestown massacre that occurred in November 1978, when Peoples Temple leader Rev. Jim Jones compelled nearly 1,000 followers to commit suicide by drinking poison, Guyana: Cult of the Damned is low-budget sleze presenting the most lurid aspects of the Jonestown incident clumsily and without context. Even co-writer/director René Cardona Jr.’s efforts to fictionalize the story are laughable—Guyana: Cult of the Damned features “Rev. James Johnson” and his followers at “Johnsontown.” Cardona neglects to develop interesting supporting characters, and he presents Johnson (Stuart Whitman) as a one-note psychopath. So, if you’re looking for a somewhat responsible examination of the history behind the massacre, seek out the 1980 TV miniseries Guyana Tragedy: The True Story of Jim Jones (1980), which features a spectacular leading performance by Powers Boothe. That film isn’t perfect, either, but it’s a world away from this exploitive treatment.

          Still, Guyana: Cult of the Damned is quasi-watchable within its lowbrow parameters. Cardona’s movie constructs a simplified narrative that transports Johnson and his followers from America to French Guyana within the movie’s first 10 minutes; as a result, Guyana: Cult of the Damned is essentially a thriller illustrating how a crusading U.S. Congressman tried and failed to save people from Johnson’s planned apocalypse. The Congressman in the movie, “Lee O’Brien”—played by Gene Barry—is a fictionalized version of real-life San Francisco politician Leo Ryan, who was killed in Guyana by Jones’ operatives.

          Cardona’s movie features lurid depictions of Johnson sermonizing to his people and occasionally supervising their torture; this lopsided depiction accentuates the horrors of what really happened in Guyana without exploring the more troubling nuances of why so many people fell under a self-proclaimed messiah’s spell. Nonetheless, it’s impossible not to generate tension when presenting a story filled with so much danger, and once things turn deadly in the jungle, Guyana: Cult of the Damned becomes darkly exciting. Using an eerie synthesizer score to pull together handheld, jittery shots of ghastly things like mothers force-feeding poison to their babies, Cardona’s climax captures the scope of a modern-day holocaust. As for Whitman’s fire-breathing performance, the actor is effective when simulating the demonic aspects of the real man’s charisma, but that’s the only note he plays.

Guyana: Cult of the Damned: FUNKY

The Bermuda Triangle (1978)

This misbegotten “thriller” would seem to merit investigation because it was made at the height of public curiosity about the Bermuda Triangle, and because Hollywood legend John Huston plays a leading role. However things like excitement and momentum disappeared during the making of this movie just like the countless planes and ships that have vanished into the mysterious part of the ocean after which the flick is named. The set-up is simple enough: A small ship filled with passengers and sailors drifts into the Triangle, and weirdness ensues. Unfortunately, the “weirdness” is as uninteresting as the passengers and sailors. At the beginning of the picture, a little girl on board the ship discovers a doll in the ocean, which she recovers and then interprets as an omen of bad things to come. If that strikes you as a crackerjack hook for a thriller, then you may be the rare soul who finds something of value in this unwatchable dreck, which substitutes confusing, quasi-psychological tumult for actual scares and shocks. Lazily directed by Mexican hack René Cardona Jr., whose other nautical-themed crapfests include Tintotera (1977) and Cyclone (1978), the movie mistakes meandering underwater photography and occasional glimpses of marine life for special effects, so don’t hold your breath waiting for something provocative or unique. Worse, the narrative wobbles between incoherent and trite; in the rare moments when the murky storyline coheres, it presents pointless melodrama with lots of Mexican supporting actors whose dialogue is dubbed (poorly) into English. Huston, the famed film director and occasional actor, lived during the ’70s near Cozumel, the idyllic Mexican coastal community where this picture was shot, so one can only assume that he liked the idea of earning a quick buck by walking down the beach and reciting inane dialogue. At least he got something out of the enterprise, which is more than can be said for viewers.

The Bermuda Triangle: SQUARE