The quintessential movie spoof that spawned an entire genre of parody films, the original
i Airplane!
i0 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
i Entertainment Weekly
i0 '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
i Airport
i0 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 'e0 la
i Saturday Night Fever
i0 , a surf scene right out of
i From Here to Eternity
i0 , 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 (
i Big Business
i0 ), David Zucker (
i Ruthless People
i0 ), and Jerry Zucker (
i Ghost
i0 ), 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.
i --Mark Englehart