Clearly, not at all named with any hopes in mind people might confuse it with
a certain Twilight Zone episode, oh no.
An extra flight – therefore populated with few enough characters from the
disaster movie playbook we’ll get to know them all, yay! – from London to L.A.
runs into a spot of trouble. Nope, it’s not just William Shatner’s acting as a
defrocked priest (though it is indeed hilarious enough to be dangerous to the
weak of mind – see also, Things Man Was Not Meant To Know) that’s the problem
here. Part of the plane’s cargo consists of altar pieces taken from an old
English abbey, and as every reader of Jamesian ghost stories knows, that sort of
thing can only lead to danger. This particular altar also includes a former
Druidic sacrificial slab, so soon, women are speaking in Latin, the cargo hold
freezes, and the plane isn’t moving very far any more.
What follows is mostly a competition between the actors concerning who can
chew the horrible 70s psycho-babble dialogue the best/worst, some moments of
“people not played by Paul Winfield become utter shites when under pressure”,
and a lot of wind noises with a bit of added chanting.
As far as US 70s TV horror movies go, David Lowell Rich’s epic isn’t anything
special. There’s little of the cleverness and actual sense for the creepy films
like Gargoyles knew on display here, with Rich fumbling every possible
fright scene through his nearly improbable bland professionalism. The script
buries the seeds for what could be a cool little British style ghost story - but
on a plane! -, or for an interesting little film about the differences between
superstition and faith and what happens when these collide with something
supernatural you really shouldn’t pray to, under a few too many 70s disaster
movie clichés, the already mentioned psycho-babble (where today’s TV is
inordinately fond of clever quips, the 70s just loved to pretend to
psychological depth by people spouting self-help book nonsense), and a haunting
so hokey it’s pretty darn impossible not to use that dreaded word “camp” (the
horror!). It’s rather frustrating, really, particularly once the film gets
around to theoretically incredibly resonant scenes like the passengers preparing
a doll as a symbolic sacrifice, and just buries them under the all-around
hokum.
That impression of camp is certainly not dispelled by half a dozen actors
fighting to out-act one another as outrageously as possible, resulting in so
many bugged eyes, melodramatic pauses and weird line deliveries William
Shatner’s acting approach here impresses as downright subtle, something that is
bound to convince even a hardened sceptic like me of the existence of the
supernatural.
Thursday, February 4, 2016
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