aka Plane Dead
- Directed by Scott Thomas
- Written by Sidney Iwanter, Mark Onspaugh and Scott Thomas
- Starring
- David Chisum
- Kristen Kerr
- Kevin J. O’Connor
- Richard Tyson
- Erick Avari
It’s hard to believe that the absolutely brilliant title this movie bears wasn’t its original one. It’s as concise and appropriate a description of what to expect from the movie as everyone’s favorite example of truth in advertising, Snakes on a Plane, which was also very clearly its inspiration, at least in basic concept. (The original title, Plane Dead, is simply dreadful in contrast.) It’s a high concept that, after so many years of airborne suspense movies, doesn’t have the right to claim originality, but on the other hand, it seems so completely natural you wonder why no one’s made it before: People trapped on a long flight with zombies. All the filmmakers would have to do is follow their natural instincts and not screw it up, and the end result would be a fun, tight piece of action-horror entertainment.
I am happy to report to you that the filmmakers did not screw up.
The setup is thus: A 747, only about a quarter-full, on its way across the pond to Paris. In the hold is a security-classified shipment of some sort, complete with an armed guard in a hazmat suit (Brian Thompson, unrecognizable in his getup). All would be hunky-dory except for the overlapping storms systems that the plane has to fly through, resulting in enough severe turbulence to shift things in the cargo hold and break the seal on the cryo-sealed crate.
Now, given the confines of the setting and thus the confines of the story (even with the massive amounts of subdivided space on a 747), you can’t launch into the zombies too soon or else the movie won’t make it past the one-hour mark. But a movie like this is technically a disaster flick, and by the conventions of that genre you’re allowed to introduce the disparate members of the cast before the crisis that forces them to interact, to wit:
- Captain Bashore (Raymond Barry, one of the few vaguely familiar faces in the cast), on his last flight before retirement. In other words, you know from the outset he’s screwed.
- Co-pilot Randy (Tony Babcock), a younger fellow who’s got something going with…
- Head flight attendant Emily (Heidi Marnhout). She’s the blonde one. With her usually are Stacy (Mieko Hillman), African-American, and Meagan (Kristen Kerr), brunette. Meagan shares an instant mutual attraction with…
- Truman (David Chisum of TV’s “One Life to Live”), a plainclothes cop handcuffed to his prisoner, a mob accountant/embezzler named Frank (Kevin J. O’Connor), who appears to have approached his role with the question, “What would Joe Pantoliano do?”
- Billy Freeman (Derek Webster), a Tiger-Woodsish golf champion, on vacation with his wife (Siena Goines), who’s tired of being married to a celebrity. He promises they’re going to put all that golf stuff behind them for the trip, but he’s still got his golden putter with him in the cabin. Gee, I wonder if THAT might come in handy?
- Two younger dating couples on vacation. Names only trickled through begrudgingly (I still don’t think they were ever all identified), so there’s Guy with Brunette Girl, and Guy with Blonde Girl. (I believe that’s Sarah Laine, Brian Ames, Brian Kolodziej, and Ashley Bashioum, in no particular order.) Brunette Girl hates Blonde Girl, which is understandable because she takes every possible occasion to demonstrate herself a consummate bitch. That probably also explains why Guy with Blonde Girl has a behind-the-scenes thing going on with Brunette Girl, the two of them slipping off to the bathroom for some face-sucking whenever possible. (Here’s a piece of advice to any guys who may be attached to Blonde Girl-like bitch girlfriends: Dump them! It’s not as if you’re married!)
- Doctors Bennett (Erick Avari — the other semi-familiar face), Sebastian (Cliff Weismann), and Thorp (Dale Midkiff), the men in charge of the super-secret whatsit in the hold. As becomes quickly apparent from their conversations, they aren’t just casually looking for a change of venue; they’re skipping the country in advance of law-enforcement raids on their California lab, transporting their cargo to an affiliated lab on the far side of Europe. The cargo, incidentally, is Thorp’s wife Kelly (Laura Cayouette), a fellow researcher infected with the organ-resuscitating virus they’d been experimenting with; the cold storage is hopefully to keep her infection from progressing before they get into their new digs.
- There’s also a nun (Claudia Katz). She doesn’t contribute much, but she stands out visibly enough to be worth mentioning.
As you can imagine, a good deal of time is spent introducing all of these characters, but there’s enough interpersonal conflict and interrelationships between the disparate groups to keep it from getting dry. And then there’s plenty of panic as the plane bounces around in the storm and overhead bins spring open.
Then, of course, the crates cracks open, Kelly comes out, and things really start spiralling downward. The armed guard in thehold is of course under-equipped to deal with someone who won’t stay dead when shot; not only that, his random sprays of semi-automatic fire (good thinking, that) manages to short out the radio system.
So when co-pilot Randy leads two of the scientists through the bolted-down hatch and crawlspaces into the hold to check on the cargo and when both Kelly and the guard attack and munch the scientists, there’s no way to radio to the ground and complain that somebody set up us the zombie.
To make matters worse, Truman the cop gets knocked unconscious when the stands up right as turbulence hits, and Frank takes the occasion to escape his cuffs and scamper into the ductwork. So for too long, Randy’s hyperventilating aside, Frank is assumed to be behind the violence they start seeing in the nether parts of the plane. Truman and undercover Air Marshall Judd (Richard Tyson) attempt to flush Frank out, but instead start seeing that what’s going on here isn’t the work of a single criminal accountant.
And what is going on here? First, Zombie Kelly bites Flight Attendant Emily. Then Brunette Girl gets pulled through the mirror in the ladies room. Then… well, then things really start going downhill, because in classic zombie fashion, bites are how the infection is transmitted, and it only takes a few minutes for a bite victim, dead or alive, to come back as a zombie. Pretty soon, a good number of the passengers are yellow-eyed and drooling, running up and down the aisles looking for flesh. You could probably classify these as “fast zombies,” though of course no one’s ever given the room to demonstrate their sprinting speed. And they are a little plot-specific in their behavior, in that they are rarely interested in consuming whole bodies, and instead gnaw just enough to kill and pass along the infection. But that just means that it’s going to be an energetic second half, as Truman and Judd go through their bullets as if they were popcorn. The zombies accomodatingly develop the habit of popping up between rows of seats, snarling, which makes some scenes look as though they were inspired by first-gen first-person-shooter videogames. (Oddly enough, it’s never specified or demonstrated what particular zombie-kill rules are in use here. Head shots? Heart shots? Jell-O shots? They’re pretty resilient, and all I can say is that if one of these zombies catches enough lead in the head-and-torso area, they’ll finally go down.)
So. Plenty of zombie-spattering and survivor-whittling, as the few left living try to figure out how to get to the unoccupied cockpit and put the plane down before (a) they all get munched, and (b) the government blows the plane out of the sky to forestall an epidemic. (Did I mention that one of the survivors knows how to fly a plane? Because in any group of 6 or more adults, you’ve got a two-thirds chance of one of them having jetliner pilot experience. Go ahead, try it sometime.)
I can’t say that this is a particularly memorable addition to the zombie genre; it certainly adds nothing to the canon. But given how often movies large and small forget to simply entertain the paying customers, I’m happy to give this one a thumbs up.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 30, before I realized that I had completely lost count
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 3
- ominous thunderstorms: 1
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 6
- Erick Avari (Dr. Bennett) played “B’lijik” in the TNG episode “Unification, “Vedek Yarda” in the DS9 episode “Destiny, “Jamin” in the Enterprise episode “Terra Nova”
- Derek Webster (Billy Freeman) played “Lt. Sanders” in the TNG episode “Gambit”
- Todd Babcock (co-pilot Randy) played “Ensign Mulcahey” in the Voyager episode “Drone”
- Brian Thompson (the armed guard in the hold) Played “Second Officer Klag” in the TNG episode “A Matter of Honor,” “Toman’torax” in the DS9 episode “To the Death, “Inglatu” in the DS9 episode “Rules of Acquisition,” “Klingon Helm” in Generations, and “Admiral Valdore” in three episodes of Enterprise
- Tucker Smallwood (“Col. Wolff,” on the military types on the ground) played “Admiral Bullock in the Voyager episode “In the Flesh” and “Xindi-Primate” in several episodes of Enterprise
- David Spielberg (“Dr. Conroy,” the CDC person on the ground) played “Cmdr. Hutchinson” in the TNG episode “Starship Mine”
