Product: Triangle (2009)
Rating: 3.0
Decent B-rate horror film, but don't expect too much
This movie is certainly one of the more unusual ones I've seen, if not the most misleading (in terms of promotion). The cover art (depending on which one you look at) shows what appears to be some psycho-killer flick with probably a lot of blood and gore, or some weird ghost romp on an abandoned ship in the Bermuda Triangle. I honestly wouldn't have watched it had I not read reviews that implied it was hardly a cheesy remake of Friday the 13th on a boat. For a lazy Friday afternoon, I figured it was worth a shot.For the first twenty minutes, I seriously thought all those reviewers had been lying. "Triangle" had the makings of an overdone psycho killer on the sea. To summarize, Melissa George's character (a single mother of an autistic child) has apparently taken her son to a special school so she can join some friends for a day cruise on a sailboat. Calling them "friends" may be an overstatement, as the group consists of a guy she met at the diner she works at (who invited her along) and all his friends, who don't think to highly of her. They head out to sea, hear a strange message over the radio, and are abruptly overrun by a storm that capsizes their boat. After the storm, all seems lost until an eerie old cruise ship appears from nowhere and stops for them. Despite seeing someone clearly aboard from afar, they find the boat empty, minus some blood and bizarre messages on walls. Then, people start getting killed... rather quickly in terms of plot, I might add. It was turning into that campy slasher flick I didn't want to watch and, had I stopped there, that's what I thought it would have been.But, things shifted gears. Drastically. It turns out that everything revealed to us thus far is not what it seems. I won't spoil the twist, but I will emphasize that it makes the movie significantly more interesting. To make things better, it is hardly the only twist in the film, and the later one is even more shocking. By the time film reached the end, I felt very satisfied with the 2nd and 3rd acts. It left a lot of unanswered questions.Overall, I give this film 3 stars. It still had the makings of a B-rate film, which I am generally not a fan of. Following the twists, the movie got superbly better, but the 1st act significantly weighed it down to the point where it left a bitter aftertaste. While I can appreciate the ending, the 1st part needed to be direly improved. I suggest saving this one for a rental.