The Concorde... Airport '79 (1979)

A few minutes into this movie, Becca turned to me and said, "There isn't anyone good in this one like the others." I disagreed. This film is filled with some of my favorite people and while it's the worst film in the series, it's also my favorite. If they ever make a blu ray of it, I demand to do a commentary track for it!Directed by David Lowell Rich (Satan's School for Girls, Eye of the Cat), this film is quite relevant today, as it's rife with corrupt corporations, drone planes and media scandals. You've got Robert Wagner playing a corrupt arms dealer who is in love with Susan Blakely, yet he keeps trying to kill her.For the ladies, there's Alain Delon as the dashing captain. And for the men, there's Sylvia Kristel as the gorgeous airline hostess. And for the fans of The Omen, there's David Warner as a henpecked flight officer.There may never be a movie as sexist as this one. Just look at the way the character of Patroni has changed. He's no longer a ground crew guy who will kick a pilot out of his own plane. Now, he's flying the plane while making sexist jokes at every opportunity To wit:Isabelle: You pilots are such... men.Capt. Joe Patroni: They don't call it the cockpit for nothing, honey.Or when he asks Delon's character about Vietnam:Capt. Joe Patroni: Gee, I remember this Eurasian gal. She had these great big blue eyes. They called her the tarantula. You ever run into her?Capt. Paul Metrand: No, I don't think so.Capt. Joe Patroni: You'd remember if you did. She was a real ball breaker!That makes me wonder - how was Patroni in Vietnam? Wasn't he already working in the Chicago airport back in the original? Well, now his wife is dead, his son is in college and he's ready to party. In fact, when they get to Paris, he gets set up with a prostitute and has the night of his life. Is he mad when the ruse is revealed? Hell no! It makes him overjoyed as he slaps his pal's back!Then there's Eddie Albert as a rich businessman and Sybil Danning as his wife, to which Patroni comments "She's his fourth wife. There's this story that back in the 20's when he was barnstorming he made a bet that he could put it to this good lookin' wing walker. He boffed her right out on the wing a thousand miles above El Paso. His ass got so sunburned he couldn't sit down a week!"What is happening with this film? I literally yelled at loud several times during it, shocked at how raw it seems in the world of political correctness. But this isn't Blazing Saddles, a film that uses non-PC language for comic effect. This is a scummy cash-in, the final film of a once high prestige franchise. And I loved every minute of this strange bird!Martha Raye gets locked in a bathroom as a plane faces turbulence! Jimmie "Dynomite" Walker smokes up and carries his saxophone everywhere! Cicely Tyson just wants to get her son a new heart! John Davidson performs his own marriage ceremony to a Russian gymnast! Mercedes McCambridge, the voice of Pazuzu, is in this! And Charo is in the credits and has around thirty seconds of screen time, thirty seconds which had me screaming in pure joy!Have you realized yet how much I adore this movie? How can you not love a film where a heat sinking missile is defeated by rolling down the window of a supersonic airplane and shooting a flare gun out the window? And after the plane went through such chaos between New York and Paris, why would anyone allow it to fly again the next day? Why wouldn't security be increased? And why not crash land the Concorde in the alps? Why would they even get on the plane in the first place?Even better, there's a news report earlier in the film that sounds like it came straight out of The Simpsons, a strange piece of comedy in a film that has been serious so far. That's because that voice belongs to Harry Shearer!Obviously, we wouldn't have Airplane! without these films. But after watching the last two films, it's pretty hard to parody what has become a parody.

The Airport series comes to a close with this final entry, a movie so awful that it can only be enjoyed as an unintentional comedy. The plot this time has pilots Alain Delon and George Kennedy trying to land a Concorde jet airliner safely while avoiding bad guy Robert Wagner's comical attempts to destroy it by . If you've seen the other films in the series, you will notice George Kennedy's character, Joe Patroni, has a different job in each one. This is the first time in the series he was shown to be a pilot. But it's our good luck that the movie didn't care about continuity because if there's no Patroni in that cockpit, this wouldn't be the gem that it is. Many of the movie's most hilarious scenes and lines belong to Patroni. His evasive maneuvers flying the Concorde and the flare gun scene in particular are the stuff of legend. Even him getting laid turns into comedy gold. Frenchie Alain Delon plays well off of Kennedy. Robert Wagner makes for a woefully inept villain.. The rest of the Love Boat-style cast includes Susan Blakely, Eddie Albert, Sylvia Kristel, David Warner, Mercedes McCambridge, Jimmie Walker, John Davidson, Cicely Tyson, and freaking Charo! What a lineup for a series that once had former A-listers like Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, and Jimmy Stewart. It's not the best Airport movie but it is a lot of fun. The special effects are embarrassingly poor. It's an absolutely ridiculous and pathetic film when taken seriously and judged on its legitimate merits. But if you like movies that fail so spectacularly you can't take your eyes off the screen, this is for you. It's one of the great "so bad it's good" movies and I recommend anyone who enjoys those to give this a shot.

Have you ever watched unintentional comedy? Well, this is it. There are so many absurdities, I couldn't keep track. The best scenes are when Robert Wagner decides to shoot down the plane with missiles and pass it off as a mechanical failure, Charo tries to smuggle a Chichiauah on the plane and, when it's discovered, claims it's her seeing eye dog, John Davidson's hair stays in place when the plane flies upside down, when a missile gets close to the plane, pilot George Kennedy rolls down the pilot's seat window (at the speed of sound) to shoot at it, Jimmy Walker smokes weed in the bathroom stall, and when stewardess Sylvia Crystal says seductively "You pilots are such men!", Kennedy replies, "They don't call it a cock-pit for nothing!" What floors me is that after the first disaster, the plane takes off for another flight and the passengers get back on! If I were a passenger, no way would I board that plane! All this is backed up by special effects that wouldn't pass for an episode of "Bewitched." If you can find this movie in the 99 cent section, I recommend it. I laughed more than I had laughed in weeks. It's great entertainment in the worst way possible.

All the entries in the 70's disaster movie franchise "Airport" – a total of four movies spread over one decade – have been chastised by critics as well as regular action movie fanatics for being too grotesque and ludicrous. Me, personally, I liked the three previous installments a lot, but I can't but admit that the swan song in the series is a completely laughable effort. The supposedly adrenalin-rushing script is absurd, the stereotypical characters are cartoonish, the acting performances are wooden and the action sequences are downright hilarious. The set-up and plot of "The Concorde" is faithful to the previous movies. We have a cast full of acclaimed names, often in inferior little roles, and a screenplay that brings together pretty much everything that can go wrong on an intercontinental flight. The prestigious Concorde aircraft is ready to fly from New York to Paris and then onwards towards Moscow in celebration of the 1980 Olympics. One of the passengers is the female journalist Maggie Whelan, who's in possession of some important evidence that will unmask her ex-fiancée Kevin Harrison as an illegal weapon dealer. It's most vital for him that Maggie never reaches Moscow and thus he tries to kill her, as well as the rest of the Concorde passengers and crew, subsequently through nuclear missiles and sabotage. Luckily for the passengers, the Concorde has two of the world's biggest macho men behind the steering wheel with the French Captain Paul Metrand and the American veteran pilot Joe Patroni. "The Concorde: Airport 79" is a dumb and fairly pathetic film, but fortunately enough it remains amusing and never bores for one second. The sight of an hi-tech advanced airplane making loops in order to evade missiles is definitely bad in an entertaining way and the hammy performances of A-list stars are fun to observe as well. Particularly Robert Wagner is tremendous as the villain. With his straight face and eloquent monologues, he represents the prototype of Bond-movie villains and I strongly suspect that Mike Myers hired him to play Number Two in the Austin Powers' movie solely based on his performance here. Alain Delon looks quite bored and soft-erotica star Sylvia "Emmanuelle" Kristel is rather unnoticeable when she keeps her clothes on. Fun bloke George Kennedy is the only actor who appeared in all four of the "Airport" movies, so it's truly a shame that he plays his biggest role in the worst of the series. The dialogs are lame and some of the clichéd sub plots are horrendous (does there really have to be an emergency donor organ transport in every disaster movie?), but I certainly didn't regret the two hours of my life that I wasted on watching this film.