Review of Zero Hour (2011) by Robin W — 06 Mar 2010

You may think that "Airplane!" mainly intended to spoof the "Airport" series and the hugely popular disaster films from its time period, but the film that it's a pretty much a direct parody is an otherwise forgotten 1957 drama called "Zero Hour!"; in fact, "Airplane!" follows this film's narrative so closely that a list of the differences between the two movies would actually be shorter than a list of similarities! The plotline does indeed involve a traumatized former pilot (also named Ted Striker!) who is forced to land a plane after the flight crew succumbs to food poisoning; a lot of a famous lines of dialogue from "Airplane!" can be seen here ("Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking" "I just want to tell you both good luck.

We're all counting on you"), but are played absolutely straight! Other iconic moments on display including the slapping of a female passenger who goes hysterical and a boy named Joey visiting the rather touchy-feely captain in the cockpit; hell, the captain is played by a former football star named Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch, which was parodied by the casting of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a pilot in "Airplane!".

As a standalone film, it must be said that "Zero Hour!" is a well-crafted, perfectly decent suspense-thriller, and if you were to watch it before you saw "Airplane!", you would probably enjoy it for what it is; however, anyone who knows "Airplane!" by heart is going to watch this and find it to be unintentional laugh riot!