Exorcism At 60,000 Feet (2020)

This is a very silly film, but don't let that fool you. It is also a very bad film. The cast list made me wonder - would Lance Henriksen and Adrienne Barbeau lend their talents to a sub-standard product? 

Yes. Yes, they would. 

This is an attempt to do a Scary Movie/Airplane hybrid, and it doesn't work. The basic plot is simple. A priest exorcises a demon, which first arose in some half-arsed fashion when he served in Vietnam as an army chaplain and tried to stop an atrocity. My Lai being employed for laughs, there. The demon gets on the plane and starts possessing the passengers. The latter are a gallery of two-dimensional 'gonzo' types, ranging from a dwarf who gets breastfed by his mother to the most stereotypical rabbi in history. There's also a bodybuilder, a Muslim terrorist, and Ms. Barbeau's character, a woman who brings her dead, stuffed pet dog on board as a support animal. 

The crew is just as comical if you don't know what good comedy is. Bai Ling plays a rude Vietnamese stewardess, Henrikson is the captain with an almost spotless record, and there are two others I can't be bothered to look up. The jokes in this film are on the level of an imbecilic frat house conversation at about three in the morning after too much beer and weed has been consumed. The subtlest witticism is that they are all flying Viet Kong Airlines. That is not a great benchmark. 

I can see what they tried. They wanted something with the energy and charm of Leslie Nielsen's Naked Gun films or the parodies of Seventies disaster movies - the Big Bus springs to mind. The problem is that those weren't comedy horrors, and for a good reason. The average horror movie (especially one with a demon in it) is already perilously close to bad comedy. The slightest push can send it plummeting over the edge. And this one plummets from 60,000 feet. 

It's a pity. There are references to classic horror, most notably the Twilight Zone episode 'NIthmare at 20,000 Feet' (the one with Shatner seeing the gremlin on the wing) and the 1973 TV movie Horror at 37,000 feet. The opening scenes pay homage of a sort to The Exorcist. But overall this film spends far too much time trying to gross out the audience while never giving the hapless viewer a good reason to find out what the next stupid gag will be.