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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