"The Cockpit? What Is It?"

Just because I wanted to watch a movie and there was absolutely nothing else on last night (sorry, I just don't find The Glass Bottom Boat to be very funny and Commando is one of Ah-nold's flops), I flipped over to the Lifetime Network and watched a pair of back-to-back airline disaster movies, Rough Air: Danger on Flight 534 and Final Descent.

They're basically the same movie: Something Bad Happens To Commercial Jet and Heroic Crew Must Get It Down, Finding Themselves In The Process. In the first, it was the Conflicted First Officer together with the Gutsy Stewardess. In the second, it was the Maverick Captain together with the Gutsy First Officer Girl Friend (with whom Maverick Captain had been having relationship issues). The second was particularly painful to watch, as the Maverick Captain was played by poor old Robert Urich, who I had previously thought to have struck bottom when he was doing tee vee commercials for the local Smooth Jazz radio station a few years ago. Even worse, he was being hectored by the Rigid Management Supervisor played by Star Trek Has-Been John de Lancie. If you were ever infuriated by the snide behavior of Q toward the crew of the Enterprise, rest assured that he paid for it. Of course, the passengers were bought wholesale from Stereotypes R Us - the Pregnant Woman, the Adorable Kids, Crusty Old Guy, Panicky Guy, etc.

As I watched these two dogs in fascinated horror, a couple of thoughts occured to me:

1. Surely the Writers' Guild can come together and agree on a ban on airplane disaster movies? They must recognize that they're never going to recreate the big-budget exuberant awfuless of the Airport series from back in the 70's. Furthermore, they must realize that Airplane! forever soured the genre by so cleverly aping it. Leslie Neilson wasn't on either one of these flights, but you kept expecting him to appear.

2. Why on earth is Lifetime running this sort of stuff? Is it some kind of Empowerment Marketing thing? If so, then why is the Gutsy Woman character still only second chair? On the other hand, I can't think of any other reason: it certainly can't be because they expect their audience to drool over the male leads. I mean, c'mon. (Speaking of which, I remember seeing poor old Eric Estrada in one of these train-wrecks called Terror in the Skies a few years back. There the Gutsy Woman role was played by Kate Jackson. Interesting that there appears to be a high-altitude graveyard for certain movie careers.)

3. Speaking of drooling, I also noticed that the production values really weren't very much different from the sort of stuff Skinemax runs late at night. Throw in a couple extra steamy scenes and the producers could repackage these movies for a completely different audience. Indeed, the plot of Rough Air involved the plane being talked down by an Icelandic Flight Control Babe. The post-landing scene between her and the Heroic Flight Crew Couple just cried out for menage treatment.

These films and their ilk certainly don't merit Truly Bad Film status. But I would think that, with a little imagination, we can come up with some kind of Honorable Mention subcategory for them. Such awfulness deserves to be recognized somehow.