Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane (2007)

Submitted by corwin on Thu, 3 Apr 2008 10:13am

I don't really have to say a whole lot about this movie, do I? I mean, you see the title, and you know immediately if you want to see it. There's no mystery or ambiguity here. Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane pretty much says it all: it is, straight up, zombies on a plane. So is it worth seeing, if you fall into the category of those who want to see zombies on a plane? In a word, yes! It's hysterically fun, totally over the top. It never pretends to be anything more than what it is: a zombie movie stealing its ideas from Snakes on a Plane. If you had any interest at all in this movie at all, you're not coming to it looking for high drama that will change the world. You're after zombies attacking people on an airplane. And by God, that's what you'll get!

So you want the plot of the movie? It's pretty much impossible to spoil it, so here you go. The Mad Scientests from the Evil Drug Company have come up with an engineered virus which has the power to bring the dead back to life. They engineered the virus from malaria in a vain attempt to be scientific (Dustin about came unglued here, since malaria isn't caused by a virus at all, but a protozoan parasite. He calmed down and laughed a lot through the rest of the movie, though, so I think they placated him some with entertainment. It's not like we were suspending disbelief here). Instead of transporting a small sample of the virus, it's actually been injected into the wife of one of the Mad Scientists, who apparently died. I forget how, if they told us. It's not important, though. She's kept in a deep freeze in the cargo hold with a single armed guard. There's probably too much story established at the beginning, and the movie did start to lose my interest at places. No one watching this flick cares all that much about the back story, except for the important parts where they establish that the pilots are dead men walking because there is someone else onboard who can fly the plane. They could also have drastically shortened the scenes establishing all of the characters as unlikeable without losing anything to make a tighter movie with even more zombie action. At any rate, the plane hits turbulence, the deep freeze thaws, and dead wifey climbs out confused. She's not really zombified, she just doesn't know what's going on. The guard freaks out and shoots her with his submachine gun. She goes down, then pops up fully zombified and craving human flesh. And it's on! The whole rest of the movie is a continuous series of increasingly over the top scenes of zombie violence. Keep in mind while watching the movie that literally everything you see is Chekhov's gun. There are a few actual guns (and they keep spontaneously generating out of thin air), but there's also a Tiger Woods golfer character who carries one hell of a putter with him. There are numerous ominous shots of the side door of the plane. And don't forget the poor zombie who turned while still belted into his seat. Poor guy can't catch a break; he doesn;t have the brains or coordination to unbuckle, and never seems to get ahold of anyone to eat. But he's got a seriously important role to play before the movie's over. One thing I really liked in this one was the role the military played. They didn't mess around. With the potential of an easily-transmitted plague with a 100% mortality rate (which also brought its victims back from the dead as active carriers), they made the obvious choice: that plane had to be destroyed before it could land. In a lot of these movies, there will be a lot of waffling at the highest levels about such action, and the delays buy our heroes time to save the day. Here, the order is clearly given to blow the plane out of the sky. When the real Zombiegeddon is upon us, I hope the joint chiefs take such a hard line against the undead threat. In the end, we're looking at a 0.1 Boll movie. It's got its problems (malaria, way too much exposition at the beginning), but it's a lot of fun. And I did see some great scenes I had never seen done before; always a good thing. if you like zombies, go check it out.