SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

JasparLamarCrabb A film so stupid it's become a camp classic and the subject of ridicule for many years. AIRPLANE lifted entire portion of this insanity finding it a goldmine of ridiculousness. After the crew is put out of commission with food poison, PTS basket-case Dana Andrews takes the helm and, along with his icy wife Linda Darnell, attempts to land the plane. They're helped along from the ground by Sterling Hayden. Directed by Hall Bartlett and with a script by none other than Arthur Hailey, this has to rank as one of goofiest serious films ever. Elroy 'Crazylegs' Hirsch and Jerry Paris co-star. Hayden actually utters the line "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking."

ferbs54 Perhaps best known today as the film that inspired the 1980 spoof "Airplane!," "Zero Hour!" (note the exclamation mark that they have in common) can stand on its own as a film worthy of recognition and reappraisal. Cowritten by Arthur Hailey a year before his novel "Flight Into Danger: Runway Zero-Eight" came out, and a full 11 years before his best seller "Airport" hit the bookstores, the film was released in November 1957. Three years before, "The High and the Mighty" had become the archetype for all future airplane disaster films; a CinemaScope spectacular with a large cast and an Oscar-winning theme song. "Zero Hour!" is certainly a smaller film, more serious in tone and with a lesser reliance on soap opera-type interactions among the aircraft's passengers. Indeed, with the exceptions of a few aged, hard-drinking football enthusiasts and the boyfriend of the plane's stewardess, we really don't get to know any of the passengers here at all. Confining its action mainly to the cockpit and the frantic men on the ground who are trying to bring the plane in, the film is an excellent exercise in escalating suspense and nail-biting realism.As the picture opens, we meet a squadron leader in the Canadian Air Force named Ted Stryker (well played, as always, by Dana Andrews), who is leading a bombing mission over Wiesbaden in April 1945. But the mission goes badly, and six of Stryker's men are killed in a dense fog. Flash forward 11 years, and we find Stryker still racked with guilt and self-recrimination regarding his decisions on that fateful day. Having given up flying, he has drifted through a full dozen jobs during the past 10 years, while his wife Ellen (the delicious Linda Darnell) and his young son Joey become more and more estranged. When Ellen decides to leave Ted, taking Joey along with her, Stryker (you've got to love that name!) impulsively boards their airplane--Flight 714 from Winnipeg to Vancouver. And it's a good thing that he does, too, as food poisoning soon lays low everyone on the plane who made the big mistake of ordering the grilled halibut instead of the lamb...including, most seriously, the pilot AND copilot! And so, with the lives of all 38 people onboard the DC-4 depending on him, Stryker must conquer his fear of flying and pilot this jet--a craft that is very much unlike his WW2 fighter plane--through a heavy fog, no less, in for a safe landing, all the while being coached from the ground by Capt. Martin Treleaven (the consistently fine Sterling Hayden). But can he make it all the way to Vancouver and land in pea-soup conditions before all the sick passengers, including little Joey, expire?"Zero Hour!" has been directed by Hall Bartlett in a manner so as to generate maximum tension, and features some very impressive B&W lensing by cinematographer John F. Warren. The film's three great leads do a splendid job of making us buy into the film, and Hayden is particularly fine. His Treleaven character, gruff and tough as can be, is yet given the film's only humorous line, when he declares, "I picked the wrong week to quit smoking!" Darnell, other than a brief emotional conversation with Stryker before takeoff, is given little to do other than parrot instructions from Ground Control, but she looks so scrumptious here that few viewers will be likely to complain! And as for Andrews, well, you can just see the icy panic in his eyes as he maneuvers his jumbo jet and flashes back to his disastrous fogbound mission of 11 years before. He LOOKS as though he is really flying an unwieldy colossus and just barely hanging on; it is a very credible performance, indeed. The film features any number of impressive scenes, including Stryker's first glimpse of the empty cockpit, as the plane flies through the air on autopilot, and the dozens of knobs, readouts, gauges, levers, dials and other gadgetry stare at him (an airplane's cockpit has never appeared so intimidating!), and of course the film's entire final 10 minutes, as Stryker attempts to make his landing. For viewers today, much of the film will assuredly seem bizarre. On this flight, not only do passengers easily board their craft by walking across an airfield, and with no signs of security in sight, but the captain actually strolls through the plane and converses with the passengers; only one stewardess (nicely played by Peggy King, in her first role) is onboard; and--most mind-blowingly--parents are allowed to bring their kids into the cockpit for a casual tour! ("Don't touch anything, Joey!") Yes, times surely have changed! But one thing that will always stay the same, I suppose, is the power of bad fish to lay a person low, and "Zero Hour!" does a nice job of depicting just how dire this believable airborne scenario could be. I can only imagine that current FAA regulations mandate that a pilot and copilot must eat different meals, so as to forestall a situation like this from ever actually arising. After all, not every flight has a man like Ted Stryker aboard!

Boba_Fett1138 Right now, I really can't think off an earlier genre movie. This movie has got to be one of the very first disaster movies, a genre that became particularly popular in the '70's.It's sort of hard to watch this movie now days, since it's hard to detach it from "Airplane!", which is a movie that spoofs this movie. Some of the scenes and pieces of dialog are even exactly the same, which makes it particularly hard to watch this movie with a straight face and see it as a different movie on its own.I tried as best as I could but while trying so, I just couldn't ever really like this movie. It takes itself far too serious, even while it's having quite a ridicules concept. It also does a bad job at handling and building up its tension, which makes this movie even worse to watch.Nothing really ever got developed well enough and the characters remain disappointingly flat and stiff. How was I supposed to care for any of these persons? It of course doesn't help that the acting in this movie is absolutely dreadful. Even Sterling Hayden, who obviously was a more than capable actor, was quite horrible in this movie. This is all also partly due to it that the movie features some truly bad dialog in it at times.It's a bad movie in a goofy sort of way, which still makes this movie a somewhat watchable one.5/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

ackstasis (Please Note: the following paragraph works best if you repeat it in a Rod Serling voice... as do most paragraphs) Flight 714 to Vancouver, Canada. The year: 1956. This ill-fated passenger plane carries 38 people, including a stewardess and two co-pilots. Among the passengers is Lt. Ted Stryker, a former fighter pilot tormented by painful memories of a wartime career he'd rather forget. For dinner that night, two thousand feet above the murky wilds of Canada, Stryker chooses the meat. His young son chooses the fish. The little boy becomes sick, very sick. Other passengers begin to fall violently ill; they also chose the fish. And, yes, so did the pilots. (end Rod Serling voice here)Armed with this nifty little premise, 'Zero Hour! (1957)' manages to be an engrossing, if not entirely heart-thumping, thriller. Certainly, the tagline claiming "The Tensest 50 Minutes in the History of the Screen" is a little generous. Bartlett's film often plays it too straight-faced for its own good, and it's no surprise that Abrahams and Zucker later lampooned the storyline in 'Airplane! (1980)' {which I haven't seen, but I bet I can guess which lines of dialogue were parodied}. No serious film should contain the line "our survival hinges on one thing - finding someone who not only can fly this plane, but didn't have fish for dinner."Dana Andrews is one of his era's most underrated leading men, and he plays the shell-shocked Stryker with empathy and authenticity. Throughout his career, he always excelled at playing the anti-hero, an ordinary man with emotional cracks beneath the surface. No doubt, Andrews was chosen for his role in 'The Best Years of Our Lives (1946),' in which his character similarly experiences a flashback to a war-time dogfight. Linda Darnell, who had previously co-starred with Andrews in Preminger's 'Fallen Angel (1945),' plays Mrs Stryker, a neglected wife who has since lost all respect for her husband. I also loved Sterling Hayden as the cantankerous air-traffic controller who tries to run things from the ground, grudgingly and without conviction.