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

This film is made of stupid.

I mean, the concept sounds great. There’s a zombie infection on board a plane in mid-flight, which means there is no escape for any of the survivors, which leaves them desperate and increases the tension. The film...sort of achieves that. Whilst it does have the characters desperately trying to survive, they do find alternate routes to take to avoid the zombie horde.

Now, the zombies in question, I feel that there’s a mixed reaction to them. The make-up is actually quite good, with the exception of the yellow eyes which made almost cancelled out the make-up. But the acting was terrible. All you had to do, was shuffle and growl, it’s not that hard! The first zombie actually talks! Well, it growls “Lucas,”, but zombies don’t talk! Whether they run or walk, I don’t mind, if they’re trained over time like Bub from ‘Day of the Dead’ to talk, fine, but they don’t magically talk immediately! And these zombies are extremely strong; so strong they can punch through metal! Yeah! They manage to punch their way from the cargo hold to the main flight deck with ease! One even jumps!

God I don’t think I’ve ever gone across the acting of zombies before, it was that bad! And the acting of the living wasn’t that great either, bordering on meh and awful. There were some good exceptions, like Kevin J. O’Conner as Frank, David Chisum as Truman and Erick Avari, most of the time, as Dr. Bennett. Wait, Erick Avari? What the Hell are you doing here? You have a career! Although we do get a scene with Avari and his two colleagues, where they were arguing about what they have in the cargo hold, which was a great combination of underacting, acting and overacting, all at once!

It’s the same with the characters. Some were completely terrible, like the four friends (two couples) played by Brian Kolodziej, Ashley Bashioum, Brian Ames and Serah D’Laine. How can we care about these four, when one girl is a complete bitch, her boyfriend and the other girl are having an affair, and the other guy offends a nun (In all fairness that was his only crime)? Then there’s Stacy the stewardess, played by Meiko Hillman, who just isn’t believable in her role while not dressed professionally. There’s also Megan who, whilst she wasn’t exactly a bad character, she was underplayed by her actress Kristen Kerr.

Paul Judd, played by Richard Tyson, is a character that is between planes. He was an effective character, he knew what to do in the escalating crisis and was effective in combating the zombies, but the actor wasn’t that great and he was annoying. His opening scene involved him telling Megan to be careful about possible freaks on board...like him. Okay, he doesn’t say that but he might as well have.

But, as I have said, there are characters who were brilliant. There’s Frank, still played by O’Conner, who was a fantastic character. He was funny, he was useful, he was clever, he was charming, and the character was intriguing and mysterious. Why was he a fugitive? Who exactly was he? He was a fantastic character.

Then there’s William ‘Long Shot’ Freeman who was just awesome! Derek Webster gave a great performance, told us a vast amount of detail in so little screen time, gave the character great depth, also brought us some laughs and was fantastic in fighting the zombie horde. We truly felt a connection with Long Shot as he tries to save his wife Anna (played by Siena Goines), and the film actually succeeded in making us care for them when they found themselves bitten and outnumbered.

But why did I say this film was stupid? Well, because of the many stupid things that occur! Let’s list:

1.      If the flight is from Los Angeles to Paris, France, why do they need permission to enter Canadian airspace?

2.      Why do they keep firing their guns like there’s no tomorrow? Did you not hear that piece of advice from Attila the Hun? “Don’t shoot fire stick in space canoe! Cause explosive decompression!”.

3.      For an American film, they don’t seem to know that the Pentagon is in Arlington Virginia, not Washington DC.

4.      It takes a lot of strength to open an emergency door when the plane is several thousand feet in the air going 500 MPH, yet Long Shot does it with one hand (Then again, Long Shot is awesome).

5.      Depressurisation fails to work properly TWICE.

6.      Flying lower in a thunderstorm doesn’t work.

7.      Paul Judd wastes ammo by shooting a zombie twice in the chest and once in the balls...after they have already killed quite a lot of zombies by shooting them IN THE HEAD! (And guess what? They run out of ammo at one point!)

8.      People get easily hurt. I swear Anna hurt her head when it bounced off a cushion during turbulence.

9.      The flight is from Los Angeles to Paris, the plane is up in the air for quite some time, and yet when it crashes it’s outside Las Vegas. Does this film not understand time and distance?

10.  Stupid green screen shots!

And probably the most confusing question in the film, if you have a top secret cargo and want to transport it to Prague or somewhere other than Paris, why not get a private plane that is not going to Paris?!

But everything stupid is pretty much cancelled out the song which accompanies the opening credits. ‘Among the Dead’ by Shayna Zaid is a fantastic song which, I feel personally, rivals the opening credit songs to the 007 films.

The film itself isn’t really that bad, it’s just mediocre. Essentially everything is adequate, but it doesn’t exceed anything spectacular. It does seem to be a film that grows on you, since I had to watch it a second time to write this review, and I did enjoy it more the second time. It can be fairly entertaining and it is worth a watch.

And if you look to the left side of the plane, you will see a zombie Apocalypse.