The Horror at 37000 feet (1973)

An internet acquaintance wrote that he used to watch this over and over again after taping this from telly and I can tell you that I am quite jealous of this, The Horror at 37000feet is a movie I would have loved to watch when I was a young. There is a certain strong cozy feeling about this kind of movie and you know what I am talking about if you've seen a few of the cheapo tv disaster-movies that were mass-produced in the seventies. That is basically what this is, a disaster movie with a cast of faces you recognize and an event onboard that is about to bring the plane down. Only this time it is supernatural.

A wealthy architect and his mentally fragile British wife are bring parts of an old ancestral abbey on board a plane and plan to bring it to the US. Of course, this means that they are bringing ancient druid spirits along for the ride and they are not happy to leave their home country. They demand sacrifice! Will it be Buddy Ebsen, the grumpy billionaire? Will it be William Shatner, not at his best as an alcoholic priest who has lost his faith which of course means he will be integral to the conclusion? Will it be Chuck Connors, slumming it up as the plane’s pilot? Or any of the other cast members of which several are speaking with really bad English accents?

The Horror at 37000 feet is first and firmly very cheap which means that as a tv-movie we are not allowed to see just about anything of the horror itself. There are very few deaths and the horror elements are no more than a lot of dry ice and slime pouring out of a hole in the carpet rug. But somehow this is quite effective in spite of really just being silly, as in the scene where the passengers try to calm down the angry spirits by sacrificing a doll to which they've glued human hair and nails upon which it erupts from within with that strange slime. Odd and weird in a nice way. The actors overact like any normal American tv-actor should and I wouldn't want it any other way. Yes, this is by the numbers but I like this kind of math a lot and as it is only 70 minutes long it is over before you know it. Great fun and I really wish I had been 10 years old when watching this for the first time instead of 40. I'm pretty sure it would have haunted my nights well into my teens.