Popular reviews

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  Review by Steve G 🇵🇸 🇾🇪 ★★½ 1

  You Have 90 Minutes To Comply 2: Brevity Rules

  It's a mediocre disaster movie with a pretty good Sterling Hayden performance, but that's not important right now.

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  Review by chavel ★★ 9

  In the 1957 Zero Hour!, before the majority of those on-board crew and passengers get sick because they had fish for dinner, Linda Darnell on a flight tells ex-fighter pilot Dana Andrews (as Ted Stryker) she can “no longer love a man she does not respect.” It’s a line strictly played for poignancy, but anybody in love with the yuk-meisters Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker/ knows the similar line all too well from the 1980 spoof classic “Airplane!” Robert Hays moments later looks cross at the camera, and says, “What a pisser.”

  The shock and awe of this suspense-on-a-plane melodrama is learning how much dialogue was actually transplanted into 1980’s “Airplane!”

  “Looks like I quit the wrong week to quit smoking,” the Captain says…

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  Review by Keith Phipps ★★★ 2

  As ripe as this is for parody—it's the primary inspiration for AIRPLANE!—it's actually a pretty solid little thriller with nice work from Andrews, Darnell, and Hayden. Still, kind of hilarious to see just how much the ZAZ team took directly from the movie.

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  Review by thebalconyfool ★★★½ 2

  I couldn't resist this one since I have a thing for Dana Andrews and also for disaster movies, of which this ticks both boxes. Here Dana plays Striker, a traumatized WWII fighter pilot who bombed a major mission and is now drifting between jobs. The movie starts off showing a conversation between Dana and his wife played by Linda Darnell which shows the marriage is in trouble. Dana then pursues her on a flight she's leaving on to try and convince her to give the marriage another chance. During the flight the pilots (and most everyone else on the plane) are stricken down with a deadly case of food poisoning from fish (don't eat the fish!) and it falls into…

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  Review by Adam L ★★★★ 3

  Ahh, the golden age of air travel. When the pilot himself would be waiting in line for the toilet right behind you and ask you if you wanted any Dramamine.

  Most reviews of this mile-high potboiler point out that it's impossible to watch it without constantly thinking of Airplane! and that is true to an extent. The pilots asking a little boy if he's ever been in a cockpit before, or a stewardess slapping a hysterical passenger to steady her nerves, are hysterical to see in this movie because of how Airplane! parodied them.

  And the whole tone of the film — deadpan to the point of ridiculousness — is what Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker mined for so much comedy…

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  Review by Arthur Slugworth ★★ 9

  As the joke-source for Airplane! I expected some similarities to my favorite comedy growing up. My eyes were in deeper and deeper disbelief as line for line, moment for moment, scene for scene, the two films appeared almost identical. I have never seen a movie more closely parodied in all my days, nor have I ever seen a parody eclipse the butt of its joke so immensely.

  So many moments in this film would harken me to Airplane! so effortlessly, that I was laughing at Airplane! jokes strictly from memory, and completing the gags out loud for my family and we were all laughing strictly by reference. I don't know if any human on Earth can watch this movie after…

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  Review by Pippin ★★★ 2

  Honestly, if you ignore the fact that Zero Hour! was remade as Airplane! the movie isn't that bad. It's difficult to review this because, well, there is a lot of dialogue that is the exact same as Airplane!. I couldn't help but laugh pretty hard when Sterling Hayden said, "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking." It's difficult to take a movie seriously when the comedic version keeps so much of the original script.

  Ultimately though, if you compare this to the Airport franchise (or the TV remake of this), Zero Hour! seems like the best movie of all time.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★

  The setup half of this often in the dull side, but everything after Andrews get to pilot the plane is pretty gripping if you don’t mind a movie share of ridiculousness. What works most is that the movie has s good sense of what makes both Andrews and Sterling Hayden star persona stand and milks as much as it can from their exchanges, Hayden is predictably terrific as he often is playing large and Andrews anxiety serves the very basic overcoming narrative beats (also very hard not to think about his alcoholism during a good chunk of this). Of course, this is know today almost exclusively for have been not so unofficially remade in Airplane, so I assume for a lot of people it is just a good source for MST3K style humor and while a few lines lift from it becomes very funny by association (particularly anything involving the fish), it is very effective on its own terms.

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  Review by loureviews ★★★ 4

  #48 in The films of Dana Andrews.

  Today I enjoyed this B-thriller just a little bit more, despite it still being hugely overshadowed by the parody of it which became 'Airplane'.

  Old pro Dana Andrews has been hiding from his bad experiences as a pilot in the war - until disaster strikes on a plane he's on as a passenger and he has a chance to make good.

  One shot early on I really liked, that of Andrews looking out from the plane window into a windswept and rainy sky; it reminded me of the scene in 'The Best Years of Our Lives' where he steps into the nose of a fighter plane and sinks back into his thoughts.

  Watch on its own terms or watch to spot the lines and scenes which were spoofed. It's only eighty minutes.

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  Review by Matt N. ★★½ 2

  I've wanted to see this film for years. I've always known that Airplane! was a spoof of Zero Hour!; what I didn't completely realise is that it was virtually a shot-for-shot remake of, with most lines of dialogue lifted directly from this! So tonight I was flicking channels and noticed it had just started on TCM.

  Zero Hour! tells story of Ted Striker, a passenger on flight 714 trying to make amends with his wife. When the pilots and crew become very sick from eating bad fish, Striker is the only passenger with flying experience who could possibly land the plane. He has to be talked down over the radio by his old air force captain, who has bad blood…

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  Review by Paul Senior ★★★

  Watched this right after seeing Airplane! and what a treat. I knew the Zucker brothers had to buy the rights to this, finally tracked down a copy.

  A reasonably good 50s thriller, made more fun by playing Spot The Line.

  Film #139 of 2020.

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  Review by Timcop ★★★

  Can't watch this and not react hysterically to all the bits I know by heart from AIRPLANE! but it was a nice surprise to see something in this that's even more over-the-top than I expected: Dick Van Dyke's neighbor Jerry Paris playing a standup comic (and fiancé to the flight attendant) who does Señor Wences type bits with a gloved Irish puppet named "Paddy".