Stars: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, William Shatner, Chad Everett, Sonny Bono, Raymond Burr

Director: Ken Finkleman

Summary: The wild and crazy crew are in the air again, and this time there's a mad bomber on board. The engines are not working, the Angel Of Death keeps appearing in the cockpit, and worst of all, the flight attendants suddenly realise they are out of coffee...

The wild and crazy crew is in the sky again, and this time there's a mad bomber on board, the engines aren't working, and the angel of death keeps popping up in the cockpit. But worst of all, the flight attendants suddenly discover that they're completely out of coffee!

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Though most of the stars got back together for Airplane II: The Sequel, the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team passed the torch to new writer-director Ken Finkleman, who manages to reprise the style of the original quite well but is, as perhaps expected, more or less one-third as funny. The premise, alarmingly similar to the dead-straight contemporary Starflight One, is that the first commercial passenger shuttle to the moon has 2001-style computer hassles en route and finds itself headed straight through an asteroid belt into the sun. Cracked-up test pilot Robert Hays and promoted-from-stewardess technical expert Julie Hagerty have to save the day, despite panicking passengers, inept ground staff, complicated trauma flashbacks, deadpan one-liners and deliberately dodgy special effects. Leslie Nielsen is glimpsed only in footage from Airplanethat sets up an extended slapping-the-hysterical-passenger gag redone (into the ground) here, but Lloyd Bridges and Stephen Stucker return as the overly-intense airport crisis controller and his happy-go-lucky gay sidekick. There are sterling cameos in the patented agonisingly serious mode from Raymond Burr (a judge), Chuck Connors (cigar-tossing fire chief), William Shatner (who gets the best sight gag) and Sonny Bono (impotent mad bomber). Back in the early 80s, it was still possible to do mild gags about paedophilia (not only Graves's chumminess with the cute kid who visits the cockpit, but also the priest looking at the centrefold of Altar Boymagazine) but aside from some incidental naked breasts, the humour is a touch cleaner than in the first film. Hays and Hagerty are better than the material, and it's all over swiftly enough--the film clocks in at 75 minutes before the slow, padded end credits--to avoid wearing out your patience. The end title promises an Airplane III, but we're still waiting. The 1.78:1 widescreen ratio of the DVD allows you to see gags in the corners of the frame that would be cropped in a full-screen transfer. --Kim Newman

Aspect Ratio:	1.78 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Subtitles:	Arabic, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian, Swedish
Year:	1982
Release Date:	March 5, 2001
Runtime:	80 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	P H E 8047
Keywords:	Airplane, Comedy, General, Wide, Screen, Sequel, Ii
Genre:	Comedy