Review of Airplane! (1980) by John M — 20 Jun 2013

When it comes to spoof movies, just give me Edgar Wright and Airplane! and you can keep the rest. When a bad fish crisis strikes at 30,000 feet, it is up to former pilot Stiker (Robert Hays) to save the day.

With pretty much the sole exception of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, it is pretty disgusting to see what the spoof movie has devolved into; teams like Friedberg and Seltzer and the Wayans brothers are the worst kind of hacks working in Hollywood, and for whatever reason, they're the only ones being commissioned to poke fun at blockbusters, which is something that I've long since come to terms with.

The style Airplane! is to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Not every single joke here is going to pull a laugh out of you, but being that it moves so quickly to the next setup, you remember far more of the jokes that work than ones that don't.

Also, another element that makes the comedy work so well here is that there are some truly random jokes where they don't address the absurdity, and refusing to go into needless explanation adds an additional layer to the joke.

This is also one of the more quotable comedies out there as well, and if anything, this is absolutely essential viewing to understand references like "... and don't call me Shirley", "I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue", and ".

.. but that's not important now".