Hubrisween 2016 :: G is for The Ghost of Flight 401 (1978)

On Friday, December 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 departed JFK Airport around 10:20pm, with the Lockheed TriStar destined to land at Miami International Airport two-hours and twenty minutes later. History shows they did not make it. On board this red-eye shuttle flight were 163 passengers as well as 10 flight attendants and the flight crew; Captain Robert Loft, co-pilot Albert Stockstill, and the flight engineer, Don Repo. By all reports the flight was routine until they reached Miami and prepared for landing, when the indicator light signaling that the front landing gear was down and locked failed to light-up. After several more attempts failed to get the proper signal, and assuming it was due to a burnt-out bulb, Flight 401 contacted the airport, aborted the landing, and requested a holding pattern, wanting to circle around until they could visually confirm the landing gear was properly engaged. Told to head west over the Everglades and to circle at 2000 feet, Flight 401 complied.

From there, a series of small but accumulating missteps would end in disaster, beginning with Repo leaving the cockpit via the “hell-hole” into the avionics bay directly below to check on the landing gear. Meanwhile, both pilots began to tinker and disassemble the landing gear-panel to try and trace the source of the malfunctioning light, thinking the plane was on autopilot. Well, it was but it wasn’t set right. Seems the autopilot could either be set and locked to a certain constant altitude or set to hold at whatever altitude the pilot last left the stick at. And so, at some point, the toggle was accidentally switched to the wrong setting. And as the fatigued and frustrated pilots fought with the stubborn panel, any amount of forward pressure on the controls caused an imperceptible loss in altitude as the autopilot kept readjusting. 

And as the seconds ticked away and the plane unwittingly got lower and lower, an altitude warning chime went off at the engineer's station, which went unheard because the engineer wasn’t there to hear it. And when the pilots finally realized how low they actually were it was already too late and Flight 401, in the middle of a scheduled turned, clipped into some trees and crashed, the left wing impacting first and then subsequently torn off, burrowing into the swamp at 227mph, breaking up completely as it went.

There were two eye-witnesses to this crash: Robert “Bud” Marquis and Ray Dickinsin, who were out gigging frogs in an air-boat. They rushed to the scene, lit by burning fuel, and started pulling survivors from the wreckage -- Marquis receiving severe burns over most of his body as a result, but he pressed on with his heroic efforts, shuttling the injured to drier and more solid ground. 

Oddly enough it was crashing into the muddy waters of the Everglades, softening and dampening the impact, that allowed for any survivors at all. (The caking mud also served as impromptu pressure bandages, preventing massive blood loss in some victims, but also caused problems with infection.) In all, thanks to calm heads and valiant rescue efforts, 77 passengers and 8 stewardesses survived the crash. Both pilots were killed on impact, but Repo survived in the nose of the plane, was evacuated to a hospital, but later succumbed to his injuries.

In the end the fault of the crash was determined to be pilot error as "the failure of the flight crew to monitor the instruments during the final four minutes of flight, and to detect an unexpected descent soon enough to prevent impact with the ground. Preoccupation with a malfunction of the nose landing gear position indicating system distracted the crew's attention and allowed the descent to go unnoticed." In response to this tragedy, many airlines established new protocols for their pilots and crews when confronted with faulty equipment, requiring at least one pilot to be monitoring the other instruments at all times, to prevent this from ever happening again.

This tragic tale would eventually be translated into two books. The second, Rob and Sarah Elder’s Crash (1977), which inspired a made-for-TV movie, Barry Shear’s The Crash of Flight 401 (1978) for ABC, focused solely on the crash itself and the investigation by the NTSB; and while the film dramatized the crash it was mostly concerned with the man in charge of the dogged investigation (William Shatner) as he fights for the truth and resists a possible cover-up by the airline and the plane’s manufacturer. However, the tale told by the first published book, John G. Fuller’s The Ghost of Flight 401 (1975), which also inspired another telefilm for NBC, doesn’t end with the crash or even the resulting investigation. No, according to Fuller that was only beginning of the story as the crash of Flight 401 also spawned a ghostly urban legend that haunted Eastern Air Lines and her flight crews and passengers for years after that fateful night.

John Grant Fuller Jr. was a New England based journalist who wrote a column for the Saturday Review magazine. He was also notorious for writing articles about the UFO phenomenon, metaphysics and other supernatural shenanigans, which soon turned into an obsession with several books written to cash in. First up was Incident at Exeter (1966), which established the author’s modus operandi of heavy research and exhaustive interviews with alleged eye-witnesses of a rash of UFO sightings in New Hampshire. Fuller followed that up with An Interrupted Journey (1966), which focused on Betty and Barney Hill, a bi-racial married couple who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and experimented on. And in 1974, Fuller published We Almost Lost Detroit; an exposé on a near-miss Chernobyl level incident that railed against the dangers of atomic energy. Now, Fuller’s wife, Elizabeth, was a former flight attendant for NorthWest and perhaps she’s the one who clued him into the ghost sightings that were haunting a rival airline. However they got on the trail, the two collaborated and carried out several interviews with wary airline personnel, which netted them some compelling testimony and a best-seller.

Steven Hilliard Stern’s adaptation of the book, The Ghost of Flight 401 (1978), begins with ominous portent, personified by a wife’s (Rossen) unheeded pleas that her husband, a flight engineer, call in sick and skip his next scheduled flight. But despite his wife’s unease and feelings of impending dread, Dom Cimoli (Borgnine) never called in sick a day in his life. And so, he kisses his wife goodbye and heads to the airport. From there, the film follows fairly closely to the truth as we meet the rest of the passengers and crew in short order, including the two pilots (Johnson, Hessemen), and Prissy Fraiser (Basinger), one of the stewardesses, as the plane takes off from Florida without incident, makes it to JFK, and then starts back on its return trip to Miami but doesn’t make it for the same reasons described above.

And after a few harrowing scenes of the downed airplane and pulling survivors from the half-submerged wreckage, including Prissy and Cimoli, who was in the nose of the plane checking on the landing gear when 401 crashed, and like his real life counterpart, later died in the hospital, the film essentially glosses over the investigation, quickly chalking it up to pilot error and moving on. For, both Fuller’s book and the movie inspired by it were less interested in what happened before the crash and more interested in what happened after, especially the salvageable parts of Flight 401 once they were released by the NTSB as pieces of the downed airliner were cannibalized and recycled as spare parts, while even larger sections were used and incorporated in the construction of brand new TriStars by Lockheed; and not necessarily interested in those parts themselves, either, but what managed to latch onto them -- ectoplasmically speaking.

Seems at some point after the crash, there were numerous sightings by multiple witnesses of the ghost of both Loft and Repo, mostly on other flights by both passengers and crew; some who knew and recognized them while others were complete strangers as they seemed to keep a silent vigil over the airplanes. In one instance a flight's captain and two flight attendants claimed to have seen and spoken to Loft before take-off, watched him vanish, and were so shaken by this they cancelled the flight. Another incident found an Eastern Air Lines executive having a one-sided conversation with whom he assumed was the captain of a flight only to realize it was Loft he was talking to. On another flight, a hysterical passenger called for a stewardess because she was concerned for an unresponsive man in uniform who looked pale and ill sitting next to her who subsequently vanished into thin air. The passenger would later identify Repo as the man she’d seen.

Witnesses didn’t always get the silent treatment either, especially the ghost of Repo, who would materialize during pre-flight inspections and offer to help or just pitch in, having been spotted several times in a plane’s galley, tinkering with an oven door. He was also spotted in a hell-hole once when the command crew heard knocking from below. But the most notorious incident happened on a flight to Mexico City, where Repo was once more spotted in the galley by a flight attendant, who reported it to the captain, who sent the engineer to check it out, who recognized his old friend as he intoned a warning from the beyond to “Watch out for fire on this airplane.” And sure enough, one of the engines caught fire but the plane managed to land safely when the fire just as mysteriously put itself out. During a later encounter, Repo promised "There will never be another crash. We will not let it happen."

At least twenty some ghostly encounters were reported and at some point someone put it together that these paranormal activities were only happening on planes with recycled parts from Flight 401. For their part, Eastern Air Lines vehemently denied or downplayed these incidents. Former Apollo astronaut and current Eastern CEO Frank Borman called Fuller’s collected ghost stories a load of garbage. Borman even considered suing the author for libel, based on his assertions of a cover-up by the airline, but nixed it, not wanting to give Fuller any free publicity. The family of Captain Loft did file a lawsuit against Fuller for invasion of privacy but the case was thrown out.

Perhaps this lawsuit was the reason the telefilm focused solely on the ghost of the flight engineer, with Cimoli subbing in for Repo, which recreated many of the incidents described above. Ernest Borgnine does excellent work as always, humanizing a character in a plot full of ciphers who are only there to string several events together. (The chemistry between he and Rossen is brief but palpable.) Beyond that you got Gary Lockwood, a novice Kim Basinger, and a ton of familiar TV faces who bring a sense of true camaraderie and sell the hell out of these incidents -- and sharp ears will easily identify veteran voice-man Paul Frees as the narrator, who also pops up constantly as several other voices either on the radio or the intercom.

Essentially a journeyman episodic TV director with a few feature films under his belt [The Devil and Max Deviln (1981)], Stern did carve himself out quite the niche directing made for TV movies, most notably Mazes and Monsters (1982) and Hostage Flight (1985). Here, Stern does an admirable job of mixing the straight with the supernatural by making the right decision not to sensationalize anything as the whole film comes off very sober -- almost procedural. Stern and cinematographer Howard Schwartz’s use of a free-floating subjective camera gives the viewer a sense of something ethereal moving throughout several scenes post-crash and I love the subtle use of camera movements in the slow-pans over an empty seat only to look back a second later and see something that definitely wasn’t there before, which then just as quickly disappears. And even on the brutally washed out print I watched on YouTube the creepiness of the aftermath of the crash, with bodies moving and floundering in the muddy water amongst the dead and the wreckage are harrowing and startlingly effective and, again, makes you wish someone would give these old telefilms a digital upgrade.

Screenwriter Robert Young also had a prolific career on the small screen, penning several other telefilms, including Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker (1979) and Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land (1983). And while the film is enjoyable enough as is, it might’ve been better served to flesh-out the middle a bit between the crash and the first sighting as we get forty minutes of a disaster movie followed up by an hour long crypto-doc that gets kind of stuck in a cycle of sighting, denial, sighting, denial, sighting, denial etc. as a tight-knit group of pilots, engineers and flight attendants try to unravel the mystery of why the spirit of their friend hasn’t moved on while also trying to hang onto their jobs when they try to report the truth of what they’ve encountered to the higher-ups; namely some weasley pencil-pusher named Evanhower (Lockwood), who serves as our doubting Thomas until Cimoli’s voice appears on an inflight recording.

And so, with concrete proof, this same group seeks out the help of a couple of mediums (Roche, Oppenheimer), who explain the psychometry of what happened and then perform some kind of ritual seance that encourages the spirit of their departed friend to let go of his guilt and cross over into the light. Couple this spiritual cleansing with the airline finally caving and removing all those recycled parts of Flight 401 from their fleet, allowing Cimoli to finally rest in peace, these multiple hauntings and sightings (and the movie and this review) suddenly came to an abrupt end. 

What is Hubrisween? This is Hubrisween. And now, Boils and Ghouls, be sure to follow this linkage to keep track of the whole conglomeration of reviews for Hubrisween right here. Or you can always follow we collective head of knuckle on Letterboxd. That's seven down with 19 to go!

The Ghost of Flight 401 (1978) Paramount Television :: National Broadcasting Company (NBC) / P: Emmet G. Lavery Jr. / D: Steven Hilliard Stern / W: Robert M. Young, John G. Fuller / C: Howard Schwartz / E: Harry Keller / M: David Raksin / S: Ernest Borgnine, Carol Eve Rossen, Gary Lockwood, Tina Chen, Kim Basinger, Howard Hesseman, Russell Johnson, Robert F. Lyons, Alan Oppenheimer, Eugene Roche, Paul Frees

Hubrisween 2016 :: F is for Fatal Games (1984)

With an establishing shot and a subtitle we go as our latest film welcomes us to the Falcon Academy of Athletics. What follows is a nickel tour through the grounds, gyms, pool, and track and field area, where we meet the institution’s staff and best athletes as they take first place in several spirited competitions ranging from swimming, to gymnastics, to varied yardage dashes, to the javelin, with each winner qualifying to compete at nationals where they will vie for a spot on the next Olympics team -- all under the pulsing beat of a Frank Stallone-ish power ballad about the madness of winning over all. Now get your scorecards out as we meet our future murder victims -- sorry, future Olympic hopefuls: gymnasts Annie Rivers, Sue Allen Baines, and Frank Agee; swimmers Lynn Fox and Nancy Wilson; sprinter Phil Dandridge; and throwing the javelin, Joe Ward.

Sufficiently stoked, these seven winners are invited to a banquet sponsored by Tiger Pharmaceuticals, one of Falcon Academy’s biggest financial backers. But no one is really paying attention to the keynote speaker, who blathers on and on about beating those damned Commies at their own game on the Olympic field of battle, as a few innocent shenanigans quickly escalates into a full-blown food fight, officially bringing these festivities to an end. 

Later that night, after a rousing round of find your own underoos, Frank (O'Leary) and Lynn (Roberts) meet up with Phil (Masterson) and Annie (Banashek) to head into town for a celebratory drink. The couples invite Nancy (Prophet) to tag along but she declines, opting to hit the weight-room after hours instead. But she barely gets three reps in before the air is split by a guided missile as a javelin zips out of the darkness and impales the girl onto the nearest wall. And then, from out of the shadows steps the hooded killer, face obscured, decked out in a black tracksuit, who quickly unpins the (oddly bloodless) corpse and drags it away, destination unknown...

An Olympic themed Slasher movie? Yes, Mary Lou Retton, we can have such things. Kind of a messy mash-up of Gymkata (1985) and Graduation Day (1981), Fatal Games (1984) was essentially director Michael Elliot and co-scriptwriter Rafael Bunuel’s only screen credit. And judging by the mess and mounting stoopidity I just watched that really isn’t too much of a surprise. To put it more diplomatically: don’t bring any logic into this one because you’ll only get your feelings hurt if you try. Now, I love slasher movies, and I actually prefer the whodunits over the howtheydunits. And there is a mystery to unravel here but it is executed so incompetently thanks to a thin script that keeps contradicting itself, which is then made worse when the sports gimmick wears itself out in the first reel, making the infernal padding-out of the run-time between kills both interminable and excruciating.

Now, there are a few twists here and there to add a little more red dye to the herring. I like the X-factor that Falcon Academy has embraced the use of experimental steroids to get an edge on the competition and keep up with the Russians, making both ‘roid rage a likely contributing factor to these killings and therefore, making everyone getting dosed a possible suspect. Under the watchful eye and hypodermic needle of Dr. Jordine (Elliot), he’s stimulated metabolisms and stunted sexual characteristics. He also quickly plows over any and all concerns and protests of his nurse, Diane Paine (Kirkland), who fears he only sees his patients as guinea pigs, and who has noticed a marked increase in detrimental side-effects as these treatments are accelerated.

And when another student, Sue Allen (Bennett), mysteriously disappears under dubious circumstances (-- that being an extended, and I mean EXTENDED, stalk and chase scene through the darkened halls in her nethers which also ends with her being impaled by a javelin), Jordine quickly panics and goes into cover-up mode, denying everything or insisting both missing girls have just left of their own accord.

Other suspects include head coach, Jack Webber (Mankiewicz), who, despite a friendly face, is still THAT bitter over missing out on the Olympics back in ‘64 and secretly can’t stand his proteges. And then there’s Belinda Drew (Williams), the women’s swim coach, who is having a clandestine lesbian affair with another student swimmer, whose only chance of making nationals is if Lynn magically “drops dead.” And of all the athletes, Joe (Love), aside from being an expert with the javelin, shows the most aggressive behavior, making him the prime suspect. At least he was until he, too, gets run through by a ridiculously impossible shot for length and accuracy with a pointed stick by the real killer.

OK, then. Even the worst or most asinine of slasher movies can find at least some redemption in the creativity and the execution of the kills. Here, though, with the killer permanently stuck on the operandi of his modus, all we get is wire-guided javelins and bloodless kills -- a cheap and convenient contrivance, as the killer keeps hiding the bodies and leaves no trace evidence to sow even more confusion for all involved. 

Thankfully, the viewer’s patience is somewhat rewarded when Lynn is killed while swimming laps in the pool, which features some spiffy underwater cinematography that leaves the killer stationary at the bottom of the pool while the victim unwittingly keeps swimming into range above. Again, how the killer drained and refilled the pool with clean water after was beyond both me and the film. Oh, wait, that’s right. These victims don’t bleed. Maybe the javelin had magic cauterizing properties? That’s me shrugging right now. But even if every single kill was on the level of Savani or Bottin I’m not sure even that would compensate for the logic of a film that shows all seven athletes qualifying for nationals in the opening montage and then spends the next hour showing them training and competing to qualify AGAIN.

And once his girlfriend disappears without a word or trace, making it a total of four students who just "ran off", Frank is the only one who thinks something suspicious is going on, even going so far as to suspect they’re all dead. Now, Frank was injured at some point, breaking his leg on an errant dismount. And now on crutches, he calls Phil and says to meet him at the Academy to help search the lockers of those who “dropped out.” And being on crutches, this slows him down quite a bit but, fear not, the camera is bound and determined to follow and show his every, freaking, step, as he breaks in and noses around the school, which eventually leads him to the basement, where he uncovers the bodies. Unfortunately, the killer is onto him, but even with only one good leg, the chase to finish him off is stretched to the limit of credulity.

Meanwhile, Phil also called Annie and filled her in on Frank’s plan. Annie beats Phil to the school -- or did she? -- he typed ominously. Anyhoo, she soon finds Frank’s body and the hooded killer in short order, leading to ah-NOTHER extended chase sequence until Annie is hit but not fatally. Here, the killer finally switches weapons, taking up a shot-put to finish killing her only Phil manages to blunder in and scare the killer off. 

Thus, with his girlfriend hemorrhaging out, Phil lets the killer go, scoops her up, and rushes her to the nurse's office. Nurse Paine is there, but is obscured by a privacy curtain. She tells Phil to put Annie on the gurney and she’ll be right out. This he does, knocking over a stack of papers in the process as the camera sneaks away and takes a peak on the other side of that curtain, revealing Diane dressed in the hood and black suit. She quickly skins her way out of it, and then orders Phil to go and call an ambulance while she starts dressing Annie’s wounds. Told to roll on her side, Annie sees the scattered papers on the floor, including the front page of a paper showing Diane was once a disgraced Olympian javelin thrower, who had to forfeit her gold medal when she was caught cheating -- the cheating being she used to be a man and had a sex-change operation to be more like dear old mom, also a former Olympian, with whom Diane had a lot of obsessive issues with.

All of this sort of came out earlier, when Annie was overcome by cramps, which Diane recognized as one of those detrimental side-effects of Jordine’s drug regimen, and whose maternal treatment to comfort Annie through them was just one in a long line of lecherous advances that were a little too touchy-feely if you know what I mean, making her patient very uncomfortable. I know, I know, who gives a shit, right? Right.

So. Annie sees this paper, and Diane sees that Annie has seen the paper, and she somehow connects this to Diane being the killer all along, triggering one, last, extended, is it over yet, please be over, no, really, just end already, and, hey! Where the hell did Phil disappear to anyways?, which ends on top of a scaffolding in the gym and the revelation that Diane can also teleport, apparently -- that or she managed to exit the gym, climb to the roof and crash through a skylight in about three seconds flat, as their struggle ends with Diane plummeting to her death, impaled on a statue of winged victory, which was to be awarded to the top athlete of the year.

Believe it or not, I remember enjoying the hell out of Fatal Games when first encountered several years ago, lumps and all, but this second viewing was kind of a slog, especially the middle section that gets bogged down in some melodramatic subplots and unending training montages and several sad attempts at Hitchcockian near misses while the killer tried to police the bodies and is nearly discovered. Still, it’s not the worst slasher movie I’ve seen by a long shot but you gotta dig to find something nice to say. And dig ah-lot.

There is a metric-ton of nudity for those inclined to such things; and a lot of equal opportunity nudity, too, as the film has lots to show for the ladies as well -- either that or it was stealth directed by David DeCoteau. (And according to the credits, Linnea Quigley is in there somewhere but I failed to spot her.) I think Shuki Levy’s score was shooting for John Carpenter but it sounds like he just got his finger stuck between a couple of keys on his Casio most of the time, and the Moog settings appear to be on modulated fart noises. The execution of the wire-guided javelins come off without any major gaffes as they find their targets but it can’t quite negate all the scenes of the killer running around with one of those flimsy things resting on her shoulder. I thought the killer’s signature look was kinda cool but can you imagine trying to sneak around or getting through a door with one of those things?

Despite the implausibility of the cover-up of the missing students, especially when you consider Jordine was given a photo of the team with the dead members X’d out, this does spare us from the usual incompetent police investigation that tend to plague these things. Also, what kind of Academy is this exactly? There is talk of classes, failing grades, and retrieving books but we meet a grand total of zero teachers and observe no class time. Again with the shrugging. And that whackadoodle beans 'n' franks transgender twist at the climax salvages things considerably though it came out of nowhere and makes little sense when it comes to motivation or any homicidal tendencies, which boiled down to if the killer didn’t get a medal then no one will.

And I could go on and on about the phallic nature of the javelin as the weapon of choice, but the filmmakers kind of gave the game away already in the first reel during that food fight, when a huge sausage slips its bun and winds up in Diane’s lap. And it’s that kind of subtlety that both sums up Fatal Games perfectly and severs its Achilles tendon, leaving it to limp around in its own mediocre plot circle indefinitely. 

What is Hubrisween? This is Hubrisween. And now, Boils and Ghouls, be sure to follow this linkage to keep track of the whole conglomeration of reviews for Hubrisween right here. Or you can always follow we collective head of knuckle on Letterboxd. That's six down with 20 to go!

Fatal Games (1984) Impact Films :: Media Home Entertainment / EP: William Kroes / P: Christopher Mankiewicz, Rafael Buñuel / AP: Jonathon Braun / D: Michael Elliot / W: Rafael Buñuel, Michael Elliot, Christopher Mankiewicz / C: Alfred Taylor / E: Jonathon Braun / M: Shuki Levy / S: Sally Kirkland, Lynn Banashek, Sean Masterson, Michael O'Leary, Teal Roberts, Spice Williams-Crosby, Melissa Prophet, Angela Bennett, Nicholas Love, Lauretta Murphy, Michael Elliot, Christopher Mankiewicz