A flight you can miss.
The H-Bomb: It’s a seemingly normal overnight flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo, populated with the usual assortment of tourists, honeymooners, and businessmen, when suddenly, one gentleman experiences breathing problems. His condition quickly worsens, as he starts to hack and spit up blood, and despite the valiant efforts of the flight crew and a couple of passengers, the gentleman passes away. That is merely the beginning of Flight 7500’s problems, as shortly after the man dies, the passenger cabin mysteriously depressurizes, and before long, people start vanishing one by one.
A small group of passengers catch on to the fact that something is not right here, and take it upon themselves to find out exactly what is going on. Who was that man who died, and what is in that weird wooden box he brought on the plane? Eventually, supernatural shit starts to ensue…
I remember catching the trailer to 7500 when it first hit teh internets some three years ago and being intrigued. Then I found out it was directed by Takashi Shimizu, the Japanese horror auteur who brought us the uber-creepy Ju-On, as well as its significantly less creepy remake, The Grudge, and became genuinely interested in checking it out. Then time went by, it was never released, and I forgot about it. Cut to late 2014, I happened upon the trailer once again, and my interest was reawakened. It still had not come out in the U.S., for legal reasons, apparently, so I nabbed a copy of the German region-free Blu-Ray for a decent price. After all, a haunted airplane flick from the director of Ju-On, how could it not be awesome?
Well, maybe I should’ve taken the fact that this thing took nearly three years to see the light of day for the obvious sign that it was… 7500 is not awesome. In fact, it kind of stinks. Perhaps Shimizu should stick to directing films in his native tongue, because whenever he attempts an English language horror flick, something gets lost in the translation. In the case of 7500, nothing even remotely supernatural or horror-like happens until roughly half-way through the film’s 80-minute runtime. Until then, we’re left observing these dim-bulb characters and their maddeningly mundane interactions.
A filmmaker like Ti West can make this sort of thing work. See House of the Devil or The Innkeepers. He writes naturalistic characters who we grow to like and invest in, that way once the scary shit finally hits the proverbial fan, we are all the more terrified for them. In 7500, all the characters are your basic, one dimensional stock types; a bickering married couple (Ryan Kwanten and Amy Smart), chatty flight attendants (Leslie Bibb and Jamie Chung), a horny douche bag (Alex Frost), a death-obsessed Goth chick (Scout Taylor-Compton), and a germaphobic Honeymooner (Nicky Whelan, who was so fucking obnoxious I was hoping and praying she’d get sucked out of the emergency exit).
For the first forty minutes or so, these paper thin stock people bore us with their worthless drivel about their love lives, wedding photos, stolen cell phones, and other such inconsequential horse shit. Occasionally, one of them voices concern over the recently deceased guy, mainly out of fear that whatever killed him might be contagious. I didn’t bother listing any of the names of any of these vapid, soulless non-people, because I didn’t really care enough to learn their names. And by the time the spooky shit starts to happen, and they start vanishing one by one, I didn’t care about that, either.
It’s a shame, because Shimizu knows how to create a creepy atmosphere, and he does from time to time use the claustrophobic setting to full effect. If he had a solid script to work with, with characters worth giving a good Goddamn about, he would’ve had something, but alas. The special effects also let him down, with some CGI exteriors of the plane that are so poorly rendered, they give the ones in Left Behind a run for their money. In fact, 7500 reminded me of Left Behind more than once; the people disappearing mysteriously, a married pilot (Jonathon Schaech) almost having an affair with a flight attendant, the fact that Nicky Whelan, as attractive as she is, annoyed the living piss out of me in both movies.
7500 truly has more in common with Left Behind than any good film should. It thankfully leaves out the religious bull dookie of Left Behind, and it isn’t nearly as abhorrent as that loathsome crotch turd, but that really ain’t saying much. All things said and done, 7500 is a dull, lightweight horror film that is mostly devoid of tension and is unlikely to please even the most undiscriminating of genre fans. The movie does manage to muster a little suspense in the final third, and the ending revelation is rather interesting and unique. By that point, though, it’s all too little, too late.
I sought this one out because I wanted to see what the director of Ju-On would do with a haunted airplane premise. Sadly, the best parts were when he showed the classic Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner as the in-flight movie (like any fucking airplane would actually have that as their in-flight movie). Bland, boring, and as utterly forgettable as its stock characters, 7500 is a scare-less time waster that is, ultimately, just that… a waste of time. On the plus side, though, the German Blu-Ray was fairly cheap.
