Second in the Airport quadrilogy, Airport 1975 puts cross-eyed stewardess Nancy (Karen Black, The Pyx) in the pilot’s seat when the 747 on which she serves coffee, tea and boilermakers accidentally collides head-on with a tiny, twin-engine plane.

That’s the fate that befalls the D.C.-to-L.A. commercial flight, disrupted by the sudden, rear-projected and laughably out-of-scale appearance of a Beechcraft Baron, due to a heart attack suffered by the man behind the stick (Dana Andrews, Curse of the Demon). The resulting hole in the 747’s cockpit sucks the co-pilot — or an obvious dummy stand-in — up and out to his doom, so have your finger ready on the rewind button; the scene’s a hoot.

Because Airport 1975 taxied in an era when women weren’t let near “a man’s job,” Nancy is judged ill-equipped to navigate the terrain and put the plane down in Salt Lake City, so airlines ops exec Joe Patroni (George Kennedy, reprising his role from the 1970 original) makes the Executive Decision for a midair transfer of someone more experienced via an umbilical cord from a helicopter. Even Nancy’s he-man boyfriend (Omega Man Charlton Heston) thinks the idea equates to insanity, to which a visibly vexed Patroni yells forcefully enough to provoke an aneurysm, “Goddammit, there isn’t any other way!”

Hollywood corn rarely comes as sweet as this enjoyably self-important sequel, directed by Jack Smight (The Illustrated Man) with costumes by the prestigious Edith Head. Actually released in 1974 no matter what the title says, Airport 1975 adheres to the rules of the decade’s white-hot disaster genre, namely in casting more stars than any movie needs. In the cockpit, we have Erik Estrada as the horndog navigator, but that was pre-CHiPs fame.

No matter — the cabin is jam-packed with has-beens, never-quite-weres and a couple of bona fide legends, including:
• a quip-happy Sid Caesar;
• folksinger Helen Reddy as a nun;
• Sunset Boulevard’s Gloria Swanson playing herself in what would be her cinematic swan song;
• Myrna Loy, Norman Fell, Jerry Stiller and Conrad Janis all trying to out-drink one another;
• and, most famously, The Exorcist’s Linda Blair as a girl being rushed to her kidney transplant — an audience-manipulative element that made for prime roasting material in 1980’s feature-length spoof, Airplane! —Rod Lott

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Smack-dab in the age of AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz (but one year before the latter inadvertently shot his way to fame), William Lustig’s Vigilante played with and preyed upon (white) Americans’ fear of becoming a victim of violence, especially in the big, bad (and minority-teeming) city. Naturally, no setting embodies that idea of a felonious metropolis more than New York City — if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere — and Vigilante is quick to claim the rotting Apple as its home.

In the precredit scene, the pissed-off Nick (Fred Williamson, Original Gangstas) tells his neighbors — and, by extension, the audience — all we need to know: The neighborhood has gone to shit and they’re not going to take this anymore. The cops have their hands full, so he rallies his fellow man by referencing their situation as “our Waterloo, baby! Take it back, dig it?” If they don’t, they soon will.

That’s because the so-called Headhunter gang terrorizing their ’hood hunt the heads of the wife and toddler son of Nick’s pal Eddie Marino (Robert Forster, Jackie Brown). Mrs. Marino (Rutanya Alda, Amityville II: The Possession) survives her brutal attack, but the little tyke is not so lucky, having a shotgun blast tear through his tiny body (thankfully offscreen — perhaps the only time the Maniac Lustig has held back in his directorial career). When an on-the-take judge gives the Headhunter leader (musician Willie Colón) a measly two-year sentence — suspended at that! — Eddie goes loco in the courtroom, ironically landing himself in jail.

As behind-bars Eddie is saved from shower rape and other misdeeds by his prison mentor (Woody Strode, Once Upon a Time in the West), Nick and pals do some hunting of their own. Eventually, these two story halves converge, but Lustig keeps them apart for so long, Forster doesn’t feel like the star of his own film. In all, the movie makes ill use of the actor, who’s more dynamic than allowed, which keeps Vigilante from being as cathartic as one would like, yet appropriately grim. —Rod Lott

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Myra Savage isn’t just your run-of-the-mill psychic. She’s got ambition; the woman just needs a little free media. So it is in Seance on a Wet Afternoon, a psychological thriller starring Kim Stanley (The Right Stuff) as the aforementioned psychic and Richard Attenborough (Jurassic Park) as her long-suffering, henpecked husband, Billy.

The pair kidnap the daughter of a wealthy London couple in a cockamamie scheme that would find Myra demonstrating her clairvoyant chops to police by helping them find the girl. But the best-laid plans of mystics named Myra, wouldn’t you know, oft go astray. Or something like that.

Stanley, an American actress whose most notable work had been on the stage, only snagged the role of Myra after a string of other would-be leads, including Deborah Kerr and Shelley Winters, fizzled out. Good for the gods of casting. Stanley, magnificently creepy as the increasingly unhinged woman, earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Seance, but lost to Julie Andrews, who had more pleasant interaction with children in that year’s Mary Poppins.

Attenborough, who also co-produced, is every bit her equal. The direction by Bryan Forbes (1975’s The Stepford Wives) is sharp, unfussy and atmospheric. It’s a perfect picture to DVR and watch on a wet afternoon. —Phil Bacharach

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If we are to believe the opening titles of Cut!, the indie thriller found inspiration in real-life events. Either writer/director David Rountree took no more than a fraction of a kernel of the truth or he’s planted it as a joke as the Coen brothers did with Fargo. Whichever option is correct, credibility is the picture’s largest liability, because so cockamamie are the main characters’ actions, I was unable to suspend disbelief. That crucial scripting mistake gets in the way of one’s enjoyment.

Cast as his own leading man, Rountree (Cameron Romero’s laborious Staunton Hill) plays Travis, an average Joe who toils in the film industry. Okay, so it’s just renting equipment, but what he really wants to do is direct, man!

Cut! Credibility Killer #1: Travis enlists the help of co-worker Lane (David Banks, who co-wrote and co-produced), an ex-con who purposely alienates customers to Travis’ utter annoyance, in the creation of a low-budget project.

Cut! Credibility Killer #2: Name-dropping the ROI bonanzas of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, Travis and Lane decide to make not a piece of found-footage fiction, but a dead-serious Scare Tactics-esque prank movie consisting of scenes in which they frighten unwitting prostitutes.

Cut! Credibility Killer #3: On parole and ever-psychotic, Lane convinces Travis that it’d be a good idea to give a homeless man $100 and a really sharp knife to “wave around” one of the whores. This leads to a lady of the night having no nights left to live.

But won’t that gory “accident” make for captivating cinema? Well, no. Although Rountree attempts to explain away all the motivations that simply do not jibe with basic human behavior and logic, his resolution does not work. Cut! climaxes with the kind of ludicrous, pull-the-rug exposition dump-cum-narrative twist that since 2004 has become known and ridiculed as “the Saw ending.” As if the heap of preposterousness hasn’t been piled high enough, his own Saw ending begets another Saw ending! The rubber band of rational thought broke long before.

Removed from the film, the core premise has potential; its details just need redressing. Rountree’s donning of so many hats — he also edited and produced, in addition to the three aforementioned duties — likely was a matter of necessity in bringing Cut! to fruition; ironically, in doing so he has spread himself too thin, leaving viewers with a weak plot and weaker performances, yet also a finished product that looks great. The multihyphenate has an eye for composition, but a deaf ear for dialogue. —Rod Lott

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Also known under the far less exploitative title of Act of Vengeance, the AIP release Rape Squad is one of those strange drive-in thrillers that packs a feminist message of female empowerment, but only after giving audiences gratuitous images of the women being groped and molested.

Lunch wagon proprietor Linda (Jo Ann Harris, The Beguiled) is the film’s first and foremost victim, raped by a man dressed right out of a slasher series, what with his hockey mask and orange jumpsuit. During the assault, he creepily “requests” that she sing “Jingle Bells” because — his words here, so don’t shoot the messenger — “Music is always good with ballin’!”

When she finds other women who underwent similar trauma, she excitedly poses the hence-the-title question, “How do you feel about forming a rape squad?” Even without Linda explaining what a rape squad is or does, and what privileges its membership possibly could have, the ladies are all-in. It entails taking karate classes, followed by a nude group Jacuzzi bath, then turning the tables on predatory dudes via such methods of dying their dicks blue. Activism never felt so … I dunno, primary-hued?

Bob Kelljan of AIP’s Count Yorga pictures directs from a script credited in part to Betty Conklin. Don’t be fooled thinking a woman had any creative say on this uncomfortable revenger, as that’s a nom de plume for David Kidd, scribe of The Swinging Cheerleaders, which I’m guessing isn’t to be found on Gloria Steinem’s shelves. —Rod Lott

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