The Bermuda Depths (1978)

After an abbreviated education, mental health problems and some time of wandering around the globe on a budget, Magnus Dens (Leigh McCloskey) returns to Bermuda where he spent parts of his childhood, as well as the place where his father died under somewhat mysterious circumstances. He connects with his old buddy Eric (Carl Weathers), who is now on his way to a Masters degree in marine biology, at the moment working as the assistant of an old friend of Magnus’s father, Professor Paulis (Burl Ives).

Early on, Magnus also meets the mysterious and beautiful Jennie Haniver (Connie Sellecca), a woman with the habit of appearing and disappearing out of and into nothing, a rather great love for swimming, and a soft spot for our protagonist. She also may be the very same girl Magnus played with when he was a child nobody but him believed existed, or a hallucination, or a ghost right from a folk tale taking place in the 1800s. But then, the romance between Magnus and Jennie is also very much out of a folk tale.

While Magnus is growing increasingly confused, Eric and Paulis discover hints suggesting the existence of some form of gigantic (as in kaiju-sized) marine animal. It will later turn out to be a giant turtle, alas not one called Gamera. There’s a strange connection between the turtle, Jennie and Magnus, as well.

Because Rankin/Bass already had great contacts to Japanese studio circles through their habit of farming out of large parts of the animation work for their regular and at the time highly popular TV specials to Japan, most of their attempts at making live action fare happened in collaboration with Japanese studios as well. For production values, this must have been quite the bargain – most other US TV movies of the time certainly couldn’t afford extensive location shoots in Bermuda like these Rankin/Bass films tended to. On paper, cooperating with Tsuburaya Productions as happened in this case must have looked like something of a coup, as well, for there was hardly any company better at making giant monsters on a TV budget than the makers of the various Ultraman series (not to speak of Eiji Tsuburaya’s past as the great special effects artist who brought us Godzilla).

However, in this case as in the other Rankin/Bass-Japanese co-productions, something seems to have been lost in translation, for the effects are never even a tenth as effective as they should be coming from Tsuburaya’s company, with little of the focus on the important detail that usually makes the model and suitmation work so great in their own productions.

Someone involved in the productions also had a tendency to hold to people behind the camera who had already proven not to be great: so most of these movies – including the one at hand - were directed by the plodding and ineffective Tsugunobu Kotani, and were based on bland scripts by William Overgard that take a kernel of good ideas but never manage – I’m not even sure they try – to turn them into an engaging narrative.

This is particularly annoying in The Bermuda Depths’s case, for here’s a wonderful opportunity for turning this into a modern romantic folktale that just happens to also include a giant monster wasted because neither Kotani nor the script show any of the imagination and ability to create the proper mood that would have been needed to pull it off. Instead, this is the sort of inoffensive TV pap US TV movies of this era surprisingly often weren’t.