Murder on Flight 502 (1975)

Excellent but underrated film

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

MURDER ON FLIGHT 502 is an Aaron Spelling-production murder mystery TV movie from 1975. It's an ultra-cheesy and dated tale about a flight from New York to London and the situation that arises when it becomes apparent that one of the passengers is intent on committing murder. Like one of those cheesy disaster movies from the decade, this features an all-star cast of faces (B-list this time around) and no less than four red herrings and one real murderer.The convoluted script from veteran TV writer David P. Harmon is the worst thing about this low rent and obscure movie, because it's really long-winded and lacking in interest. You're supposed to care about the characters involved in a film like this but you never do here; the tale is merely episodic, solving one mystery sub-plot before moving on to the next. Director George McCowan had previously made the fun B-movie FROGS but can do little with this film's story.The actors do the best with the material they've been given. Old-timers Ralph Bellamy and Walter Pidgeon supply old-timer advice. Theodore Bikel does shifty and sweaty very well (as anyone who saw his Columbo appearance can testify). Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Brooke Adams supply glamour as the stewardesses. Danny Bonaduce is incredibly annoying as the red-haired joker. George Maharis is the guy on the ground trying to solve things. Sonny Bono plays himself, essentially. The unravelling of the mystery isn't very interesting, but I do have a soft spot for TV movies from this era so it wasn't all bad for me, and the more dated a film is the more fun I find it to sit back and enjoy the fashions and attitudes from the era.

A murderer is loose on board Dumbbell Airlines.Collection of idiots on a 747 get picked off one by one as the half-wits back at the airport try to figure out what the hell is going on. Farrah stars as a ditzy stew, Sonny Bono is a goofy musician, Theodore Bikel is a spooky weirdo, Danny Bonaduce is a prank-pulling punk, and Robert Stack is Mr. Bigshot Pilot who would like to stay and chat but he's got to get back to the cockpit because, "somebody's gotta 'drive' this airplane." Polly Bergen is cute as a sexy drunken chick. I'm with her........ get the hell out of my seat, Fernando Lamas!

747 en-route to London from New York is discovered to have a psychopath on board. Spelling-Goldberg TV-movie apes the theatrical plane-disaster films which were all the rage throughout the 1970s. The cast is a bizarre mixture of old and new faces, with Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Brooke Adams as stewardesses, Sonny Bono as a has-been musician, Polly Bergen as a flirtatious, drunken writer, Molly Picon and Walter Pidgeon as chummy oldsters, Hugh O'Brian (looking like Hugh Hefner) as a police detective, Danny Bonaduce as a 13-year-old prankster, and Robert Stack in the Charlton Heston role of the no-nonsense pilot (there are two other Stacks listed in the credits, perhaps making this a family affair). The low-budget doesn't allow the performers much to room to emote, with most of the in-flight action confined to First Class and the cockpit. There's also some hideous stock footage of emergency vehicles on the ground, as well as tiresome sidebars to George Maharis playing a security chief at Kennedy Airport with a toothache. The mystery surrounding stolen money gets muddled up alongside chatter about a bank robbery and a cop who was murdered, and a plot twist involving Farrah's character is just shucked off at the end. There's dumb-fun in watching this thing play out--if you're not too demanding--though one persistent question remains: why was the priest wearing fingernail polish?

This film falls firmly in the So Bad You'll Love It pile of bargain-bin wonders, a TV feature film, of the type made for audiences assumed to have an IQ equivalent of a retarded chicken.The corny Dialogue reaches new heights of hilarity only matched by the Airport series, and its spoof Airplane! (Flying High). Cheap sets - an "airport lounge" that looks like the set of a cheap office where some equally cheap 70s show had just been filmed, the "aircraft" with impossibly wide expanses, giant square door, "hundreds" of passengers of which we only see a handful and sometimes the cabin seems empty, the TWO, yes TWO stewardesses, disappearing passengers (Danny Bonaduce stops appearing in the cabin half way through) a cockpit where nothing ever seems to happen except hilarious radio exchanges, a plane that takes off and in the next shot is shown landing (different models, different colour schemes even used in consecutive shots of the supposed airliner taking off), not to mention the impossibly ridiculous "script". Its hard to believe that this film was intended to be taken seriously. One of the priceless lines (about a bogus priest who wears nail polish - what???!!!)comes from a psychologist attempting to analyse why someone would impersonate a priest: "A clinical manifestation of religious hysteria!" - I kid you not. See it and prepare to laugh yourself silly.