Writers: Sidney Iwanter, Mark Onspaugh, Scott Thomas
Director: Scott Thomas
The concept behind Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane (also known as Just Plane Dead) is a simple one: zombies on a plane. The idea is pure genius.
What a pity it’s been wasted on this movie.
The film begins, as you can guess, on a plane at 30,000 feet. It’s just left Los Angeles and is on the way to Paris. On board this typical flight we have a pilot making his last run before retirement, a nun, a mad scientist, a cop and his prisoner, a sporting hero and a group of oversexed teens. Oh and we also have a mysterious top secret medical cargo that’s being guarded by a man in a biohazard suit with a sub-machine gun (an SMG on a plane?!?).
Before long the plane encounters turbulence, the sealed container breaks open and the flight becomes the ultimate dead eye.
As you’ve probably guessed from that description, Flight of the Living Dead is played for laughs. Except that it isn’t, which is the main problem. There are a few sight gags in the last half of the film but they’re few and far between. I like dry comedy played straight but even I found little to laugh at here. And as a serious horror movie Flight of the Living Dead stinks.
To be fair there are a few moments of inspired genius such as the umbrella, however there really are very few. Most of these are also towards the end by which time the impression of bad movie is well established.
With a halfway decent script Flight of the Living Dead could have been a great movie. It could have been played either as serious horror with the claustrophobia of an aircraft at 30,000 feet or as pure comedy with all the opportunities the situation provides. It ends up as neither. The script is a collection of stereotypes, infodumps and a plot lacking in originality, the direction is uninspired, the pacing is completely wrong.
The end result is a lazy mess that provides neither tension nor much humour as it grinds tediously to its inevitable conclusion.