• Directed by David Lowell Rich
• Written by Ron Austin and James Buchanan, based on the story by V.X. Appleton
• Starring
  • Chuck Connors
  • Jane Merrow
  • William Shatner
  • Roy Thinnes
  • Paul Winfield

Since both feature William Shatner, you could be forgiven for assuming that this TV-movie was a remake/expansion of the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (with the title showing the effects of inflation, naturally). That’s what I assumed as I hunted it down. I wasn’t until after I had a bootlegged VHS taped from TV in my possession that I looked further into it and realized that what I had was completely unrelated to the Twilight Zone episode. But hey, it was still William Shatner on a haunted airplane, so I didn’t feel too disappointed. (I didn’t know how Richard Matheson’s original story could have been expanded to movie length anyway.)

The airplane in question is a 747 setting out on a red-eye flight from London to New York, and even before we get introduced to most of the cast, someone helpfully drops some crucial exposition: the plane’s got barely any passengers, but that’s okay because the cargo hold is chock full of a ruined medieval abbey that someone is relocating to America. Suddenly, the haunting is the least of my concerns; I just wanna know how they’re going to get that through customs.

“Okay, but as long as we’re headed west, we’re bound to run into something, right?”

Even though the plot hinges on the supernatural, the script follows the format of a disaster movie like Airport (1970) or The Poseidon Adventure (1973). As is common in disaster movies, there isn’t any real protagonist, a fact that is confirmed for us in this movie by the cast being listed in alphabetical order in the opening credits. Instead we have a goodly number of people making up the “group protagonist” if you will, and it’s their interactions which occupy the screen until the menace is underway. (As is also a precedent set by disaster movies, there are very few unknowns in the cast, although it’s instructive to compare the A-list talent featured in proto-blockbuster disaster movies against the cadre of familiar B-listers assembled here.) They are:

- Alan and Sheila O’Neill (Roy Thinnes, of TV’s The Invaders, and Jane Merrow). He’s a very successful American architect; she’s the British heir to the land on which the ruined abbey had rested. Although their backstory isn’t well explained, one gets the impression that he’s bringing the ruin on her family’s land to America supposedly “for her,” but that she isn’t nearly as impressed by such a grandiose gesture as he’d hoped. They spend most of their downtime snarking at each other.

- Paul Kovalik (William Shatner in the least credible toupe of his career) and his wife Manya (Lynn Loring, who’s Mia Farrowing as hard as she can). Paul’s an acerbic fellow who’s skill and delight is in putting away the liquor; her role is to tell him to slow down. It isn’t revealed until later, but what they hey: Paul used to be a priest until he lost faith in just about everything. That self-removal from the priesthood is the subtext of every exchange between the couple, so I can’t imagine it was long before; in any event, Paul has thrown himself into the role of the sarcastic skeptic with gusto.

“Yeah, yeah, something on the wing, blah blah blah.”

Captain Slade (Chuck Connors). Seriously, if you want a pilot who can get your plane out of the sky safely no matter what, it’s a toss-up between Chuck Connors and Batman.

Mr. Farlee (Buddy Ebsen), a focused and goal-oriented businessman cum multi-millionaire.

Steve Holcomb (Will Hutchins), a Western actor with a “yee-haw” accent on his way back from shooting a spaghetti western. He looks like Sonny Bono wearing the costume Marty McFly wore to the the Old West in Back to the Future 3 and talks like Toothless Yokels League kicked him out for demeaning their profession.

Annalik (France Nuyen — Elaan of Troyius!), the fashion model who’s mostly there for Alan to flirt with when he goes to the bar for a drink.

Mrs. Pinder (Tammy Grimes), who had been Alan’s main opposition in removing the abbey, and who is traveling to the U.S. to try again in an American court. She warns Alan of gloom and doom and general vague nastiness soon after takeoff.

“When I say I need to use the bathroom, I really need to use the bathroom!”

Dr. Enkalla (Paul Winfield), who has no character and needs none. He instead has functions which he fulfills in this movie: first, as the unflappable medical doctor, and second, as (in the words of Spike Lee) the “super duper magic Negro” who intones various wise pronouncements to calm people down through the course of the movie.

The little blonde girl traveling alone (Mia Bendixsen), mainly because you gotta have a kid traveling alone in these movies.

Plus a copilot (H.M. Wynant), a flight engineer (Russell Johnson — yes, “The Professor” from Gilligan’s Island), and a couple of stewardesses (Darleen Carr and Brenda Benet). (We were still able to call them ’stewardesses’ in 1973, right?) Missing from our roster of archetypes: The young soldier just returning from active duty, the recently engaged/newlywed couple, the old lady with the fawned-over lapdog, and the nun.

In between the various scenes that introduce our captive passengers, Strange Things start to happen. The plane finds itself standing still in mid-air, as if it had encountered a 600-plus mile-per-hour headwind, and turning around still leaves them motionless. Sheila starts hearing chanting voices in her head, though all she can understand is her name. One of the stewardesses is trapped in the mini-elevator between airplane levels when a blast of frigid air bursts out of the cargo hold. And when the captain and the flight engineer go to investigate, the flight engineer ends up insta-frozen, and Captain Slade escapes with literal freezer burns on his arm, burns in the shapes of clawmarks.

A scene from the little-known sequel, Rosemary’s Cabbage Patch Kid.

When Sheila goes into a trance and collapses, chanting like the voices in her head, Paul is on hand to identify it as Latin — specifically part of a Black Mass. And Mrs. Pinder triumphantly reveals that in the heart of the altar that the O’Neills are transporting is a Druid sacrificial stone, on which Sheila’s own ancestors offered human sacrifice to the Old Ones, every hundred years on Midsummer’s Eve — and by golly, that’s today!

You know, there are two kinds of people in this world: the kind who look at the preceding paragraph and wonder why anyone would worship Druid deities in Latin, and and the kind who wonder why Mrs. Pinder booked a flight on this plane, knowing that the Old Ones were going to do some serious damage if they didn’t get their sacrifice. I’ll let you decide which kind you are.

At about the two-thirds mark, I came to the conclusions that Stephen King had seen this TV-movie some years before he wrote “The Mist.” That’s about the point at which these nominally rational people, led by Manya and Mr. Farlee, wonder if the Old Ones want Sheila as their sacrifice, or if they ought to use the little girl. That’s a pretty unsettling idea to be bounced around on a TV-movie that originally aired on CBS.

One thing this flight is not lacking for is captains.

In the end… well, I won’t spoil it, even though the odds that you’ll ever see this in either a legitimate or bootlegged release are pretty slim (though it is available streamed on Veoh). Suffice it to say that things are set right after Noble Sacrifices are made, the Old Ones really aren’t as fierce as they let on, and William Shatner was deep into that period where he eschewed “acting” in favor of “doing that William Shatner thing.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 2, plus 1 dog
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
  • William Shatner, obviously
  • France Nuyen (Annalik) played Elaan of Troyius in the classic episode of the same name (and yet here, William Shatner doesn’t even give her a sideways glance!)
  • Paul Winfield (Dr. Enkalla) played Captain Terrell in Star Trek 2, and Captain Dathon in the TNG episode “Darmak”
  • Darleen Carr (“Margot,” one of the stewardesses) played “E’Tyshra” in the DS9 episode “Armageddon Game”