Amazon.com Essentials:
The quintessential movie spoof that spawned an entire genre of parody
films, the original Airplane! still holds up as one of the brightest
comedic gems of the '80s, not to mention of cinema itself (it ranked in the
top 5 of Entertainment Weekly's list of the 100 funniest movies ever
made). The humor may be low and obvious at times, but the jokes keep coming
at a rapid-fire clip and its targets--primarily the lesser lights of '70s
cinema, from disco films to star-studded disaster epics--are more than
worthy for send-up. If you've seen even one of the overblown
Airport movies then you know the plot: the crew of a
filled-to-capacity jetliner is wiped out and it's up to a plucky
stewardess and a shell-shocked fighter pilot to land the plane. Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty are the heroes who have a history that
includes a meet-cute à la Saturday Night Fever, a surf scene right
out of From Here to Eternity, a Peace Corps trip to Africa to teach
the natives the benefits of Tupperware and basketball, a war-ravaged
recovery room with a G.I. who thinks he's Ethel Merman (a hilarious cameo)--and those are just the flashbacks! The jokes gleefully skirt the
boundaries of bad taste (pilot Peter Graves to a juvenile cockpit visitor:
"Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked?"), with the high (low?) point
being Hagerty's intimate involvement with the blow-up automatic pilot doll, but they'll have you rolling on the floor. The film launched the careers of
collaborators Jim Abrahams (Big Business), David Zucker (Ruthless
People), and Jerry Zucker (Ghost), as well as revitalized such
B-movie actors as Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Robert Stack, and Leslie
Nielsen, who built a second career on films like this. A vital part of any
video collection. --Mark Englehart
