In the Great Remakes, join us for AIRPLANE! in 35mm, followed by ZERO HOUR!, the all-but forgotten thriller that it spoofed.
AIRPLANE! in 35mm at 7:15pm
Airplane! didn’t invent the spoof movie any more than This is Spinal Tap invented the mockumentary. But, just like Spinal Tap, it transformed and elevated the low comedy sub-genre so thoroughly that it’s considered the originator. Prior to Airplane!, spoof movies, even the best works by Mel Brooks, had the feel of movie parody skits done on The Tonight Show, The Carol Burnett Show, or a Bob Hope special—with the sketch comics practically mugging for the audience with gleeful awareness of how funny they were being. Airplane! demonstrated that, rather than having comedians spoof movie conventions, casting the very stars who played the stiff, straight-arrow leads in Hollywood disaster movies and having them deliver funny lines with every bit as much conviction as they did when acting in dramatic roles, was infinitely more hilarious.
When Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker embarked on the follow-up to their underground hit The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), they wanted it to play as if the audience was watching an old movie on TV, with a main feature constantly getting interrupted by commercials and other station business. But the more the team worked on their script, the more they realized that the disaster movie they were spoofing should be the entire film. Airplane! counts as a remake because the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team convinced Paramount to purchase the remake rights to the 1957 disaster movie Zero Hour so they could take its plot, central characters, and even verbatim dialogue to send-up the entire disaster movie genre. In the 1970s, big-budget, all-star disaster movies, specifically “prestige pictures” like Airport and its first sequel Airport 1975, were as common as superhero movies are today. Contemporary audiences less saturated with disaster pictures may not laugh as uncontrollably for 87 minutes as we did back in 1980, but Airplane! is still a ridiculously enjoyable film to watch with an audience (especially off a rare, near-mint condition 35mm original release print!).
ZERO HOUR! at 9pm
Based on a 1956 Canadian live TV movie starring Star Trek’s James Doohan, written by Arthur Hailey (whose novel Airport incited the whole disaster movie craze), Zero Hour is an all-but forgotten little movie that is impossible to watch now without thinking of Airplane!, because of how ingeniously repurposed it was for that spoof picture. It is a unique delight to watch the stoic, straighter then straight-faced stars Dana Andrews, Sterling Hayden, Linda Darnell, and Geoffrey Toone (as well as professional football player and non-actor Elroy Leon “Crazylegs” Hirsch in the role Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would play in Airplane!) as they deliver some of the exact same lines in the exact same way as the actors in the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker spoof. And if you can possibly clear your mind of Airplane!, Zero Hour stands on its own as an effectively taught little thriller.
You may also like the following events from Somerville Theatre:
- This Sunday, 3rd August, 03:59 am, Midnight Special: Vanishing Point in Somerville, MA
- Next Tuesday, 5th August, 07:30 pm, Green Screen: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 35mm in Somerville
- Next Wednesday, 6th August, 11:30 pm, Grey Gardens in Somerville, MA
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