Airplane! for JOE’s Cult Classic section – surely you can’t be serious? We are serious, and don’t call us Shirley.
First off, we know that it’s nearly impossible to write anything about Airplane! without the reader’s head becoming filled with quotes from what may just be the best comedy in film history.
So if you like, we can wait a few minutes until you’ve got “Excuse me, Miss? I speak Jive”, “Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?” or “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue,” out of your system. Done? Then we’ll begin.
Released upon an unsuspecting public in 1980, Airplane!, like all great spoofs, came at a time when a genre has reached its commercial peak and is thus ripe for parodies. More specifically, the film was a spoof of the tropes established in the hugely popular Airport film series, which had its own trilogy in the 1970s.
Written and directed by brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, Airplane! was their first directorial effort and followed the critically well-received The Kentucky Fried Movie, a fairly unspecific spoof of exploitation movies three years previous.
Damn that lucky Autopilot…
The trio would eventually go on to give us the Police Squad! TV series, Top Secret! and The Naked Gun films but arguably neither they nor star Leslie Neilsen ever topped the endlessly quotable fun that was Airplane! In fact, the late Nielsen’s role as Dr. Barry Rumack was a major watershed for the actor, as he was previously known for his matinee idol looks and dramatic performances, but never looked back after Airplane!
Chronicling the events of an unwilling hero, an ex-pilot (Robert Hays as the wonderfully named Ted Striker) that must face his fears and land a plane after the crew is taken ill, Airplane! ratchets out at least three jokes per minute, with sight gags, nonsensical wordplay (witness the ‘Roger’, ‘Clarence’, ‘Vector’ and ‘Oveur’ cockpit confusion), all combining for the breeziest 87 minutes you’ll ever watch.
In a world where spoof movies are now at the mercy of directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (the terrible human beings that created Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie and Vampires Suck, all in the past five years) watching Airplane! is a reminder that spoof movies don’t have to the cinematic equivalent of eye-gouging torture. In fact, they can reach a laugh-per-minute quotient unheard of outside the vaunted likes of Blazing Saddles or more recently, Anchorman.
Having been chosen by US network ABC as the funniest movie of all time earlier this year on a primetime TV special, new generations are constantly discovering for themselves the delights of Airplane!, even if they’ve never watched a Gladiator movie, been to a Turkish prison or seen a grown man naked.
If you love cult films as much as JOE and Jameson, be sure to come along to Jameson Cult Film Towers’ next screening on November 29 – Alien. Click here for details and for more cult films, check out the Jameson Cult Film Club.
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