Reviews

Ultra low-budget outing from French sex director Rollin has even less plot and an even deadlier pace than his previous films, LE VIOL DU VAMPIRE (1967) and LA VAMPIRE NUE (1969). A newly-wed couple travel to a castle to meet the bride's cousins. It turns out they are vampires with a harem of bloodsuckers. Cheesy, pretentious with lots of nudity and almost no violence at all. Psychedelic rock score is ultra-bad. What you get is an attempt at creating atmosphere (fog, colorful lighting) and Rollin's trademark before-sunrise coast-finale. Stay away unless you are a die-hard fan.

Bizarre vampire/sex fantasy about rich brat Martin, who stumbles upon secret bourgeois-like society, which conducts secret perverse ceremonies in a mansion rented by his father. It turns out the members are protecting a female vampire from extra-terrestrial mutants! Rollin's second feature (following LE VIOL DE VAMPIRE) has occasional flashes of style but drags on and on and on, bordering on pretence due to low budget.

A psychoanalyst and his wife go to a château in the country, which is inhabited by four vampire sisters. Rollin's first feature is distinguished by good photography and score, which manage to overcome the bizarreness of the plot and the deliberate pacing. An atmospheric horror classic, but decidedly not for all tastes.

I first saw this movie on television during the fall of 1974 and I really enjoyed watching this very much. This is about a 14-year-old girl who is already in trouble with the law and has to spend time in prison.

Linda Blair plays the role of Chris Parker, who is supposedly a good kid, but does not seem to stay out of trouble. She is picked up by law enforcement officers and is sent to a women's prison where she gets her first experience at being physically assaulted. She did get out of prison on parole, but is soon sent back because her parents (Kim Hunter and Richard Jaeckel) could not trust her because money was missing from her mother's wallet and Blair is immediately suspected. At that point, Blair becomes very hardened and not because of her parent's accusations, but because of spending time in prison.

Blair comes in contact with a counselor, (Mary Murphy) who she confides in and began telling her stories of how she was treated very badly and had that woman in tears, but soon enough, the woman learns that this young girl is not what she claims to be after learning what happened while she was on parole and confronted her about this.

Kim Hunter played the role of Blair's movie mom Mrs. Parker and has done a very superb job in playing this role. She was a housewife who stayed at home and sat in her recliner watching television and smoking cigarettes.

Richard Jaeckel played the role of Blair's movie dad and did a very superb job in playing this. He behaved much like any father to his own daughter. He was the one who played in the 1976 movie "Jaws Of Death." He played the role of the sociopath who raised approximately 20 sharks and commanding them to kill.

Mary Murphy did a superb job in playing the role of the prison counselor Miss Murphy. She did her lines to perfection and nothing was out of place.

I do have to say that Linda Blair did a superb job in her role as young Chris Parker. She was only 15 years old, but played as a 14-year-old and everything she did was perfect! She has starred in other movies like "The Exorcist," and "Sara T." In her other 1974 movie "Sara T" she played the role of a very young alcoholic who experienced alot of problems in her life. Blair can really act, I mean, really act and it is because she has that very special talent. This is the beginning of something very special for miss Blair. Now she will do some nice films like Savage Streets, Chained Heat, Night Patrol, Savage Island and many others. I like when she is nude.

Director Donald Wrye has really done a great job in directing this movie. He has directed all of the scenes very well and despite of the scenes that were violent, they were well managed.

This is a movie that teenagers and their parents should watch. This gives insight of how even parents who have provided a very good home for their teenagers can wind up in the same situation as Chris Parker's parents.

Dedicated filmgoers collect so many varied pleasures as the years go by. Who can forget the first time they saw Welles' Citizen Kane? Ozu's Tokyo Story? Antonioni's The Eclipse? What gems of insight and emotion have been mined from the works of Jean Renoir, of Max Ophuls and Fritz Lang, of Hitchcock and Mizoguchi? Yet, if I had to choose between saving all of their films or preserving Airport 75, I must admit that I would hesitate.

When it comes to a film as rich as Airport 75, where does one begin? Perhaps a drum roll of the cast that adorns this archetypal 1970's disaster epic is as good a way as any to get started: we have Charlton Heston and Karen Black as the leads, and, in a display of has-beens and never-was's that would make any Hollywood Squares devotee salivate, there's Susan Clark, Sid Caesar, Jerry Stiller, Norman Fell, Martha Scott, Beverly Garland, Sharon Gless, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Erik Estrada all on board.

And that's just for starters! Myrna Loy plays an elderly tippler, Helen Reddy is a singing nun, Linda Blair is a cheerful girl in need of a kidney transplant, and, in the pièce de résistance, Gloria Swanson is.Gloria Swanson. If you loved Airplane!, which lampooned Airport 75 in particular, you should go straight back to the horse's mouth and rent this seminal entry in bad cinema.

In a lengthy opening tracking shot that invites comparison with Orson Welles' similar feat in Touch of Evil, we follow cross-eyed stewardess Black into an airport as the names of the guilty keep coming and coming via the credits, a veritable orgy of cut-rate players. When the names finally stop, Heston quickly propositions our heroine. `I can do wonders in thirty minutes,' he promises, but Black's having none of it. `Maybe I'm tired of one-night stands,' she whines, as we imagine, quite against our will, the alarming image of the two of them in the sack. After she leaves him, the credits begin again and inform us that Edith Head designed the clothing (only senility can possibly excuse the neckerchiefs she gave to the stewardesses.)

When asked the secret of her ageless appearance by adulatory reporters, Swanson explains, `I won't take poisoned food, I don't like it.' Nuns Martha Scott and Helen Reddy observe her impromptu press conference intently. `It's one of those Hollywood persons,' says Scott with disdain. `You mean an actress?' asks Reddy. `Or worse,' Scott replies, rolling her eyes to heaven. Black tries to shield a new blond stewardess from the lustful advances of Erik Estrada, but this novice can take care of herself. `I'm emancipated, liberated and highly skilled in Kung Fu,' she boasts. `Whatever happened to womanhood?' wonders a pilot in response.

As the cast from Hell shuttle over to their flight, Swanson just won't shut up. When Norman Fell doubts if the plane will fly, Gloria says, `In 1917 I was flying in something wilder than this. You know who the pilot was? Cecil B. DeMille!' Just about everybody in Airport 75 proves to be as ready for their close-up as Swanson, especially little Linda Blair; when she is wheeled onto the plane, bad film-going delight turns into purple junk food ecstasy. She smiles satanically at everyone and says, `It's so exciting! The people are so interesting!' to her mother Nancy Olsen, who once played the ingenue in Sunset Boulevard, making this her second film with Swanson in which she doesn't share a scene with the silent diva.

`Jokes' drop like potato pancake batter into deep-frying fat. `I'll take you into the lion's den,' says Black to her blond Kung Fu-fighting co-stewardess. `Who's afraid of the lion's den, I'm Jewish!' quips blondie. Later, she calls the horny Estrada a `disgrace to your race,' and truer words were never spoken. Two old ladies cluck over a book called Epicurean Sexual Delights, and another woman anxiously hides her dog. People keep saying, `You've gotta see Gloria Swanson-she looks terrific!' Yet the camp high point, of course, is the now legendary scene where Sister Helen sings a jaw-dropping song to ailing Blair about how `you best friend is yourself.' You want so much for Blair to projectile vomit pea soup all over the plucky nun, but, alas, she just keeps smiling. The plane is filled with all kinds of weird goings-on and bizarre talk, but, as far as appalling remarks go, Fell takes the cake. `I once had a girlfriend who was half French and half Chinese,' he says. `I came home one night and she ate my laundry!'

Airport 75 exhibits a deliciously crummy television aesthetic. When the plane is hit, most of the pilots (including, thankfully, Estrada) are sucked out into space. As Black, The Cross Eyed Stewardess Who Has To Fly The Plane!, takes over the controls, the fact that she is traveling at airplane speed and is sitting right next to a massive hole in the cockpit is represented visually by her cast-iron hairdo blowing gently in the breeze! The way that Heston talks her through her ordeal is purely sexist, with all kinds of, `Baby, calm down honey,' stuff. It's as if all the controls were phallic-there's constant hilarious innuendo about nose dives and `keeping it up.'

As for Black, who really carries the whole movie, this is an immortal performance. With her dueling lazy eyes, she is able to keep watch over all the buttons and switches at once; she flares her nostrils, bugs her freaky orbs, and even sticks out her tongue when trying to get a pilot into the plane. When Heston, in an atrocious yellow turtleneck, manages to get aboard, Black tells the passengers that they'll have to shut down one engine. I adore the voice of one of the extras who pipes in, `We're gonna die!' in a dry, matter-of-fact voice.

They do land the plane without a hitch, and the ending, appropriately, belongs to Swanson. When she slides down the emergency landing shute, La Swanson's body double flashes us a glimpse of white panties (definitely the funniest image in the movie.) When her assistant murmurs that it's a good morning, Gloria says rather touchingly, `Every morning is beautiful, you're just too young to know.' This demonstrates that Airport 75 is, finally, a contemplative film about life and its finish-or at least the finish of many show biz careers.

Though Airport 75 is the height of the Airport oeuvre, Airport 77 is worth checking out for Lee Grant's astoundingly bad performance as an alcoholic (on television there is also an extra hour of flashbacks to the passenger's lives!) And Airport 79: The Concorde has pilot / airline manager extraordinaire George Kennedy wrapping it all up with the line, `They don't call it the cockpit for nothing sweetheart!' as stewardess Sylvia Kristal recoils in horror. Kennedy appears in all four Airport movies as the same character, Petroni. Why anyone let this guy near an airport after a while is up for debate-it's like continuing to invite Jessica Fletcher to your parties: you know someone's going to get killed.

An obnoxious, bloody, exploitative attempt at social relevancy which sees a group of rich folk traveling to a getaway in northern Michigan. Here all the sick decadence of the group surfaces in the space of a weekend. Orgies, killings, and other gross happenings are paraded before the camera.

Linda Blair plays the character Barby here, she is only a child but she got the eyes of the an angel and the voice of a goddess. She play the party very well. Nobody would know that this little child will have the part in one legendary horror film named The Exorcist after this film.