Posts by David Annandale

Last week: the lovably pathetic spectacle that was Airport 1975. This week: Airport ‘77. “Bigger and more exciting than Airport 1975!” boasted the trailer. And for once, the publicity was right. That doesn’t mean the film is good, as such. But it does represent an interesting exception to the law of diminishing returns when it comes to franchises. Three movies in, and we encounter as close to a high point as the franchise is going to get.

So, last time, we examined Airport, which I see as something of a proto-disaster film. While it is in many ways the fountainhead of the 70s cycle, the disaster itself is a third act development. The same is not true of its follow-up: Airport 1975 (1974). This flick emerged at the height of the disaster movie craze (the same year as Earthquake and The Towering Inferno). There's no ambiguity here. It's all about its disaster. It's also quite rightly featured in a little tome entitled The 50 Worst Movies of All Time.

Recently, I've had occasion to go back and revisit the Airport franchise. The 70s disaster movie arguably came into being with the first film (though the first pure disaster film of that era is more properly The Poseidon Adventure). If the peak of that cycle of cinematic carnage was Irwin Allen's The Towering Inferno, and its spectacularly lovable nadir is Allen's The Swarm, the Airport movies fell somewhere between the two. The best are the first (Airport itself) and third (Airport '77). The other two – Airport 1975 and The Concorde: Airport '79 – approach The Swarm's level of cosmic ineptitude.

I'm very late to the party here, but I've never been shy about jumping on a bandwagon (if I might so mix my metaphors), especially one as spectacularly kitted out as this one, so allow me to add my voice to the legion who are chanting the praises of Inside (French title: A l'intérieur). Directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, this brutally effective piece is yet further evidence that the creative vanguard of the horror film has shifted from Asia to French-speaking Europe.

All right, I know this horse is so dead it’s glue, and I’m one of the killers, but after calling for a remake last week, I have to at least go on record with my extreme dread over some others coming down the pike.

My principle in this series has been to look at films that were botched the first time around, but nevertheless contained a germ of something that might actually blossom into a wonderful piece of work, given the right team. Meanwhile, there are some projects that sound wacky enough that they just might work, but don’t (hello, Neil LaBute’s Wicker Man). And then there are those that are doomed from the start.

Two weeks ago, I proposed that, if remakes were inevitable, the subjects of said remakes might as well be worthy of that treatment. In other words, if the original is mediocre or worse to start with, no harm done. And maybe we’ll finally wind up with a good film. Granted, experience hasn’t given us much cause for optimism in this department, but hope springs eternal, even in the face of terrible odds, otherwise the human race would have committed collective suicide long ago.

Kino has long been the go-to company for first-rate DVD editions of classic films, with a special emphasis on the silent era. Recently, they have released a box set that is something of a wet dream for fans of vintage, hard-to-find cinema: the German Expressionism Collection.