AIRPLANE MOVIE MOVIE

The facetiousness has also been kept to a tight 88-minute running time by Patrick Kennedy’s rapid-paced editing. The direction is as wild and woolly as the script, but the team of Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker have a good eye for visual jocularity and they set the sight gags up for maximum effect. The level of humor is not always consistent, but the filmmakers have thrown almost everything in with a shotgun approach and the routines work more often than not. The jokes are directed at sex, politics, religion and almost everything else. The humor is an ingenious concoction of satire, spoof, burlesque, slapstick, raunchy dialogue and low-comedy sight gags. There is also a wild takeoff of the Saturday Night Fever dance contest, set in a seedy waterfront disco. But it also sends up almost every other airplane drama, disaster epic and turgid melodrama ever made, from Jaws (jetliner tail fins cutting through the upper level of a cloud bank to the strains of John Williams’ ominous Jaws theme) to From Here to Eternity (a passionate couple emerging from the pounding surf covered with slimy seaweed). Specifically, it is an outrageous satire of Paramount’s 1957 drama, Zero Hour, to which the plot bears a vague resemblance. And hopefully it is just the beginning.Īirplane! is essentially an affectionate, albeit totally irreverent, tribute to the movies. These were just sketches, however, and Airplane! marks their first fully developed script.

They then transferred pieces from this comedy revue to the screen in The Kentucky Fried Movie. These three crazy comics from Milwaukee first developed their peculiar brand of zany, media-oriented satire on stage in their Kentucky Fried Theatre, which kept Los Angeles audiences in stitches for four years. The geniuses behind this inspired silliness are Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, who wrote, directed and executive produced the outrageous spoof, with Jon Davison on board as producer. Koch production, which was made for the amazingly low budget of $3.5 million, is hilarious and will undoubtedly soar into the stratosphere of the year’s big moneymakers.

Paramount should have an easy summer, just sitting back and collecting the huge profits that will be flying in daily on Airplane! This Howard W. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below.

AIRPLANE MOVIE MOVIE

On July 2, 1980, Paramount unveiled in theaters Airplane!, which would eventually become known as one of the great movie comedy satires.

Airplane movie