Some movie channel I get has been playing 1970s disaster movies this week, and I must say, Airport ’77 takes the cake! There’s all kinds of silly stuff going on, and it also answers some questions too: like why aren’t pilots now paid as well as they used to be? Well, obviously it’s because everyone saw them crashing planes left and right in these Airport movies! Plus, there’s a bank robber here in Southern California called the “Geezer Bandit”, and they think he’s using makeup to look like an old man while he robs banks; well, obviously he learned how to do this from Airport ’77, where some pilot guy puts on a fake mustache and a wig to pretend to be a maintenance guy, so he can sabotage the plane. But the funny thing is, after he goes through security (they don’t check his bag because he’s a pilot), he secretly switches bags with some other guy to get his wig and sabotage stuff. So, um, how did the other guy get the malicious materials through security? He’s not a pilot! Wouldn’t it have been better to get the pilot to bring it in? Oh, never mind…
Anyway, it’s all very believable, and that’s why it works so well! That’s also why we still have a new Airport movie every year! But there is a problem with this movie, and that’s the fact that Christopher Lee is in it, but he’s not a monster or anything. The plane crashes into the water in the Bermuda Triangle, and despite that being the perfect cut-off-from-society location for a monster to strike, they still don’t do it! And the worst part is, this plane is filled with paintings and other artistic treasures being donated to a museum by some “philanthropist” guy (part of the 1%! I say: “Get him!”); so would it really have been such a stretch to say he also donated a mummy? Then the mummy could come to life and kill everyone while they’re waiting to be rescued, and when they finally get the rescue guys to enter the plane: bang! The mummy kills them too! It would be perfect!
What’s even better for this scenario is that the plane crashes into the Bermuda Triangle! You see, the Bermuda Triangle was the place for all the supernatural stuff before ghost hunting, so it would be a great place for a mummy to come back to life, especially in 1977! Plus, the Bermuda Triangle is a triangle, and as such, it’s the perfect geometric shape to remind the mummy of the pyramid it must have come from, and once it realizes it’s not in Egypt, it gets all mad and kills everyone! And since all of its tomb treasures are not with him, naturally he’ll figure all the airline passengers stole it, and so he’ll be mad that he can’t cross the river into the afterlife (he’ll obviously see the plane is underwater and assume it’s stuck in the river Styx or whatever because he’s missing his afterlife treasure stuff), and so he’ll stalk and kill them all, looking for his afterlife treasure, and it will all make perfect sense to everyone! Right?
So finally they could have made a horror movie that made perfect sense for a change, but they dropped the ball! What a missed opportunity! I can’t think of any other reason why they don’t make airplane disaster movies anymore, so I must be right about this. They’ve had snakes on a plane (Snakes on a Plane), Dracula attack people on a plane (Dracula 2000), so why not a mummy attacking people on a plane? (Yes, I know they kind of had a mummy attacking a plane-thing in The Mummy, but it’s not the same! This would have been like Horror Express, but on a plane instead of a train, and with a mummy instead of a missing-link ape-man monster. And everyone knows mummies are better than ape-man monsters! That’s why The Six Million Dollar Man TV series ended: they got a bionic sasquatch character instead of a bionic mummy character, and everyone lost interest!)
