Halloween Party: Flight of the Living Dead
Hey, guys! It's ZOMBIE WEEK here at the Think About It Central Halloween Party! Seven days of podcasts, reviews and merriment surrounding the Walking Dead, all leading up to Saturday's very special feature that I really hope you all enjoy. But today, it's time for a review of one of the newest zombie flicks on the shelves, Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane.
Yep. you read that right.
And whatever you're thinking about the movie based on that title, it's probably true.
Warning -- minor spoilers in the review.
Scott Thomas, the writer and director of Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane, swears up and down that the movie was not made to cash in on the cult status of Snakes on a Plane, and since Thomas has never done anything mean to me, I’ll take his word for it. Still, it’s a little hard to believe when you consider just how many scenes in Flight virtually duplicate scenes from Snakes. On the other hand, a lot of those scenes are fairly obvious ones when you consider the setting is an airplane. There’s only so many places you can go. Even taking that into consideration, Flight of the Living Dead achieves a level of zombiefied cheesy fun that few movies can equal.
The film starts on a transatlantic flight to Paris. Unbeknownst to the passengers or crew, there are three fugitives from the law on-board - scientists who have been experimenting with what they thought was a new strain of the Malaria virus. (I will briefly pause here to allow you all to go to Wikipedia and confirm that Malaria is not, in fact, caused by a virus.) Instead, they’ve discovered a virus that can briefly reanimate the dead. With a little tweaking from them, they’re trying to use it to bring the wife of one of them - Dale Midkiff, who approximately three people remember from the TV show Time Trax - back to life. Oh yeah - and his wife is in the cargo hold, frozen. Now some people would wonder exactly how three scientists on the run from the law could get themselves onto a transatlantic flight with a freezer chest and a guard for that chest wearing a full biohazard suit and carrying an automatic weapon. Some people would question that. These people would never make a movie like Flight of the Living Dead.
The film then allows us to scope out the rest of the body cou-er, cast. Among our passengers and crew are:
• An air marshal disguised as an aging hippie.
• Two teenage couples that hate each other, and are cheating on each other.
• A random nun.
• Some sort of law enforcement officer escorting a prisoner to Paris. We have no idea what law-enforcement agency this character represents: LAPD, FBI, CIA, the Junior Woodchucks. Doesn’t matter. Also, one of the flight attendants gets a crush on him.
•A professional golfer and his shrew of a wife. When I realized there was a pro golfer in the cast I immediately got excited. This could only mean one of two things: either the golf clubs would become weapons or he would be called upon to make some sort of ridiculous golf shot to save the day. I vehemently prayed for the latter.
• A pilot making his last flight before retirement. (I swear to you, I could not be making this stuff up.)
What with one thing or another, the plane runs into some nasty weather, which causes contents to shift in cargo and free the frozen wife… but here’s the wacky thing! She’s okay! She’s perfectly all right and sane and not trying to eat anyone… until the guard, who is the only person on the planet stupid enough to fire an automatic weapon at an unarmed woman begging for help in the cargo hold of an airplane, opens fire. Well apparently this wacky Malaria virus offshoot is activated by lead or something, and we’ve got our first zombie, quickly followed by our second zombie, followed immediately by more blood than many local Red Cross chapters collect in an entire year.
This movie is as cheesy as it gets. Lousy dialogue, bad acting and horribly predictable situations. And yet, somehow, it’s still a fun movie. It’s a fun kind of cheesy, a tongue-in-cheek, wink-at-the-audience cheesy. Last week I reviewed Dead and Deader, which failed miserably because it actually was under the impression that it was a successful comedy. Flight of the Living Dead is the kind of movie where everybody involved, from the actors to the director to the screenwriter, have all realized perfectly well they’re making a terrible movie and therefore are going to have fun with it. And it is fun, make no mistake. You laugh, you shriek, you jump at the fake scares and you hope the guy who played Mohinder’s father on Heroes gets munched alive. For Heaven’s sake, this movie even tells us how much it would be suck to be a zombie who needs dentures.
This movie is total crap, but if you can’t have fun watching this kind of crap, you shouldn’t even be reading this.
Yep. you read that right.
And whatever you're thinking about the movie based on that title, it's probably true.
Warning -- minor spoilers in the review.
Scott Thomas, the writer and director of Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane, swears up and down that the movie was not made to cash in on the cult status of Snakes on a Plane, and since Thomas has never done anything mean to me, I’ll take his word for it. Still, it’s a little hard to believe when you consider just how many scenes in Flight virtually duplicate scenes from Snakes. On the other hand, a lot of those scenes are fairly obvious ones when you consider the setting is an airplane. There’s only so many places you can go. Even taking that into consideration, Flight of the Living Dead achieves a level of zombiefied cheesy fun that few movies can equal.
The film starts on a transatlantic flight to Paris. Unbeknownst to the passengers or crew, there are three fugitives from the law on-board - scientists who have been experimenting with what they thought was a new strain of the Malaria virus. (I will briefly pause here to allow you all to go to Wikipedia and confirm that Malaria is not, in fact, caused by a virus.) Instead, they’ve discovered a virus that can briefly reanimate the dead. With a little tweaking from them, they’re trying to use it to bring the wife of one of them - Dale Midkiff, who approximately three people remember from the TV show Time Trax - back to life. Oh yeah - and his wife is in the cargo hold, frozen. Now some people would wonder exactly how three scientists on the run from the law could get themselves onto a transatlantic flight with a freezer chest and a guard for that chest wearing a full biohazard suit and carrying an automatic weapon. Some people would question that. These people would never make a movie like Flight of the Living Dead.
The film then allows us to scope out the rest of the body cou-er, cast. Among our passengers and crew are:
• An air marshal disguised as an aging hippie.
• Two teenage couples that hate each other, and are cheating on each other.
• A random nun.
• Some sort of law enforcement officer escorting a prisoner to Paris. We have no idea what law-enforcement agency this character represents: LAPD, FBI, CIA, the Junior Woodchucks. Doesn’t matter. Also, one of the flight attendants gets a crush on him.
•A professional golfer and his shrew of a wife. When I realized there was a pro golfer in the cast I immediately got excited. This could only mean one of two things: either the golf clubs would become weapons or he would be called upon to make some sort of ridiculous golf shot to save the day. I vehemently prayed for the latter.
• A pilot making his last flight before retirement. (I swear to you, I could not be making this stuff up.)
What with one thing or another, the plane runs into some nasty weather, which causes contents to shift in cargo and free the frozen wife… but here’s the wacky thing! She’s okay! She’s perfectly all right and sane and not trying to eat anyone… until the guard, who is the only person on the planet stupid enough to fire an automatic weapon at an unarmed woman begging for help in the cargo hold of an airplane, opens fire. Well apparently this wacky Malaria virus offshoot is activated by lead or something, and we’ve got our first zombie, quickly followed by our second zombie, followed immediately by more blood than many local Red Cross chapters collect in an entire year.
This movie is as cheesy as it gets. Lousy dialogue, bad acting and horribly predictable situations. And yet, somehow, it’s still a fun movie. It’s a fun kind of cheesy, a tongue-in-cheek, wink-at-the-audience cheesy. Last week I reviewed Dead and Deader, which failed miserably because it actually was under the impression that it was a successful comedy. Flight of the Living Dead is the kind of movie where everybody involved, from the actors to the director to the screenwriter, have all realized perfectly well they’re making a terrible movie and therefore are going to have fun with it. And it is fun, make no mistake. You laugh, you shriek, you jump at the fake scares and you hope the guy who played Mohinder’s father on Heroes gets munched alive. For Heaven’s sake, this movie even tells us how much it would be suck to be a zombie who needs dentures.
This movie is total crap, but if you can’t have fun watching this kind of crap, you shouldn’t even be reading this.