Beneath the Planet of the 747s

THE BOYS in Hollywood pride themselves on being able to predict the future. A few years ago--before the DC 10, Three Mile Island and the Ford Pinto entered their current slump--the batboys of the celluloid ballpark elected a new captain. His name was Irwin Allen and his product was the disaster movie. Only one of every 5000 people will ever experience an earthquake, fire, avalanche, sea wreck or airplane crash, Allen reasoned--why not give everybody the thrill of seeing (and feeling) it like it really is?

Who can forget O.J. Simpson, running through the flaming conflagration of The Towering Inferno in his first appearance on the big screen, only to hand Fred Astaire Jennifer Jones' cat--and leave Jennifer Jones to roast in the skyscraper. Or the likes of shipmate Roddy McDowall, saving some singing blonde floozy when the cruiser Poseidon rolled over and played dead--only to end up a piece of fondue in the ship's smokestack.

Everybody remembers Gwen from Airport (the original, that is, when it was plot enough to have a regular plane with a pregnant stewardess--no fancy water dives, Concordes or singing nuns for Arthur Hailey). She was the one who divided her time between stealing the little liquor bottles and getting it on with unhappily married pilot Dean Martin when the co-pilot left the cockpit. And then there was Earthquake, that child of the San Andreas fault, which co-starred Charlton Heston, a house that chased after its inhabitants and the marvels of Sensurround. And what about Hurricane, Avalanche, The Black Hole or even Tidal Wave, the low-budget Japanese thriller that brought Lorne Greene out of retirement and Alpo commercials to play "the ambassador" but never made it past the West Coast.

Hollywood also has a longtime fascination with itself. There is an almost instinctive urge on the Sunset Strip and in beautiful downtown Burbank to dredge up old films. Although Dino DeLaurentis reigns as the King Kong of this burgeoning market, almost everybody has tried his hand at it. The products range from ridiculous but harmless--Heaven Can Wait--to dramatic yet stupid--Invasion of the Body Snatchers--to just plain banal--The Blue Lagoon.

God knows why but three young and talented men by the names of Jim Abraham, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker decided that there was a pressing need to merge these two schools of film. They chose as their object every diaster movie ever made and the 1957 thriller, "Zero Hour." The twist to all this is that they wanted to make the whole garbled mess funny.

LIKE ITS PARENT film, Airplane! is the story of some smelly fish--fish that makes you break out in a cold sweat, experience severe muscle spasms, puke your guts out and then faint dead away. It all sounds rather dull until some passengers, the navigator, the co-pilot and the pilot (played by the wonderfully straight Peter "Good morning Mr. Phelps" Graves) happen to choose fish for dinner. Then things begin to happen. The plane goes out of control, the stewardess switches on the automatic pilot and the doctor (played by Leslie "Watch me tackle that wave" Nielsen) manages to convince the control stick-shy former Air Force pilot into guiding the plane to the ground. In short, the shit hits the fan.

There really isn't any plot here but that doesn't matter. The best choice these neophyte directors made was using serious actors. Aside from Graves, Robert "Name Your Game" Stack fills in as the pilot who's handed the assignment of guiding flight 209 to the ground and Lloyd "Sea Hunt" Bridges plays the glue-sniffing, heavy-drinking chain-smoking director of the Chicago airport. Mixed in with the emergency, as one might guess, is a romance between the Air Force pilot turned taxi driver, played by the ingenuous Robert Hays, and the stewardess who takes over the co-pilot's chair from Kareem Abdul-Jabar. Julie Hagarty plays the sallow, teary type--she's sure to snag a nighttime sitcom role from this appearance.

Airplane! is about as funny as you want it to be If you go ready to laugh at sight gags--control tower operators playing pong basketball on radar screens--some genuinely racist humor--in the form on two men speaking "jive"--and endlessly repeated jokes--"Surely you must be joking." "I told you not to call me Shirley."--then you'll enjoy the film. But don't go expecting Woody Allen or even Mel Brooks--there's something very anticlimatic about this film after all the media hype. As in most films where the plot is the background for the jokes, there are as many dull moments as there are funny ones.

SOME TIME AGO, a Hollywood producer sat down and thought it might be great fun to make a parody of a disaster movie. The product of his thoughts was The Big Bus, the story of a nuclear-powered bus that ends up half over a cliff in the middle of the Grand Canyon. While Airplane! is light years ahead of its grounded partner, it leaves you only with some funny one-liners; it's not the four-jokes-a-page side-splitter it strives to be. Like the poor suckers who chose the fish, you'll end up enjoying it while you consume, but you won't take much of it home with you.