Halloween Countdown: A Memorable Matinee

-WARNING-
If you hate scary movies, skip on by this post! The movie in question is not your run of the mill scary movie, it seriously haunted me for years.



In the 80's movies on television were still an important staple. DVR and Tivo were not around and VCR's were used mostly for movie rentals. I remember distinctly looking forward to Saturday and Sunday afternoons for the Million Dollar Matinee. Although I did not live in, or even really that close to Maine, for some reason our NBC came from there and the local personalities who hosted these movies were usually as interesting as the movies themselves. The movies would not be considered great but they were usually always up my alley. Movies like the original Battlestar Galactica, Flash Gordon (Sam Jones version), The Planet Of The Apes series, old Tarzan's and long gone from the theatre James Bond flicks.



I remember one Sunday afternoon in the late 80's, I would have been around 12 or 13. I was in our rec room in the basement when the Sunday matinee began. My mother was upstairs on the sewing machine (I still remember those little lines that would go across the screen each time her foot hit the pedal), the rest of my family were all out. The movie, one I had never heard of, began. I don't remember much about most of it really as I only half watched the first half. It was about a woman (Kim Novak) who survived a shipwreck and two Coast Guard helicopter pilots are sent to rescue her. The boat however was drifting in a mysterious part of the ocean known as Satan's Triangle. As memory serves me, the movie was not really that well written, well acted or well done. As memory serves me, that mattered little, the impact was not connected to the quality.



Satan's Triangle is all about the ending, an ending so creepy and unsettling that as I said, it haunted me for years. When the movie was over I was in a sort of state of shock and it took me a long time to get the courage to leave the rec room and run like hell upstairs to be close to my mother. She knew something was wrong, but I could not really articulate what it was.

I knew nothing at the time about Kim Novak, but her face in her final scene is forever implanted in my brain. I am not joking when I tell you even this week, me in my thirties was re-watching the ending (on youtube) and I again had that wave of evil and childhood terror re-enter my body. My research tells me my reaction was shared by many as the film has developed quite a cult following. Might have been my age when I first watched, but this movie, that last scene, stayed with me like no other. There is a great site with a bit more info/perspective on the film HERE: I am not so much recommending this film as commenting on the power of a movie moment, a Sunday afternoon movie matinee moment that stuck.