Survivor - L'aereo maledetto

THE SURVIVOR is one of those cases where the trailer is a lot creepier and more entertaining than the film itself. The setup is quite intriguing: Robert Powell plays the pilot and sole survivor of a 747 crash in Adelaide, Australia. Jenny Agutter is a psychic medium who contacts him to inform him that the victims of the crash are angry lost souls and need him to set everything straight.

This film promises a lot but quickly degenerates into a very slowly paced thriller which gives us neither shocks nor gore in a misguided effort to try to play to both the audiences of high-brow scares and exploitation. It's no wonder it never hit American theaters as the film feels very, very foreign and doesn't have much in the way of action or entertainment value beyond its opening cataclysmic plane crash (which is handled surprisingly well). There's a little bit of creepiness to go around but much, much too little too late. Also the film obviously spent the lion's share of its budget on production design for its wrecked plane in field location, so unfortunately it feels pretty repetitive after the umpteenth time the characters come back to it.

I do have to give a special mention to the film's musical score however. Brian May is almost criminally marginalized as the composer for the Mad Max films as well as all-too-often confused with the guitarist from Queen. In my opinion he provided all of the best film music to come out of Australia during the 70's and 80's and this film has to be near the pinnacle of his work, up there with ROAD GAMES and TURKEY SHOOT.

Oddly for a film set in Australia the film doesn't have much home base representation among the principal cast. American acting legend Joseph Cotten is on-hand as a Catholic priest. This was his last major film role though sadly a waste as his character is completely superfluous.

Produced by the South Australian Film Corporation and filmed on location in Adelaide, The Survivor in many ways foretells the Lockerbie disaster many years before that tragic event. The film was a huge commitment at the time - a full scale 747 was made at a local car manufacturing plant and transported to the 'crash site'. I remember visiting the set after the shoot - it was still littered with suitcases, seats, clothes and the engines were windmilling in the breeze. The haunting music makes the film, similar to Picnic At Hanging Rock, the actors believable, the cinematography honest and the storyline compelling if a little slow. Take it for what was cutting edge at the time for a small film studio and you have an enjoyable slightly disturbing thriller. Take time and watch other productions by the SAFC - they're a refreshing change from the big studios mass produced entertainment.

Robert Powell and Jenny Agutter star in this Australian production of a pilot and a medium who have need of each other after an air crash.

Powell was the pilot of an airliner which crashed on coming in for a landing at an airport. Mysteriously he was the only survivor and he survived with barely a scratch, but with retrograde amnesia, he cannot remember any of the details of the crash.

Agutter is a psychic who is having a bad time seeing visions of what happened and apparently communicating with those who died. What they discover about the crash the story for the rest of the film.

This film marks the farewell appearance of Joseph Cotten who has a small role as a priest. Soon afterwards this most classy of leading men from the golden days of Hollywood suffered a stroke and was forcibly retired from the cinema.

It's not a bad film, Survivor, but it plays like a blown up version of an episode of the TV series One Step Beyond. It might be worth a look if that's how your tastes run.

One of only a few James Herbert adaptations to reach the screen (the others being "Deadly Eyes" a.k.a. "The Rats", "Fluke", and "The Haunted"), this is a pretty effective movie overall. Directed by actor David Hemmings ("Blowup", "Deep Red"), it's handled with a large degree of sensitivity and subtlety, and is quite slowly paced as well, focusing on building its atmosphere rather than centering around shocks - all reasons why some horror fans might not care for it too much. But if you're patient with this one, you will be rewarded with a film that succeeds at creating a vague sense of unease and maintaining a level of unpredictability.

It certainly begins with a bang: a 747 plane crash lands in the Australian countryside, and its pilot Keller (Robert Powell) walks away without a scratch. Burdened with the guilt of being the only survivor, he's also suffering from amnesia and is determined to discover the cause of the crash. He's eventually assisted by a young woman with psychic abilities, played by an especially beautiful Jenny Agutter.

Also in the cast are Australian actress Angela Punch McGregor, whom you may remember as Michael Caine's leading lady in the film version of Peter Benchley's "The Island", and Hollywood legend Joseph Cotten, although Cotten truthfully never gets a whole lot to do as a local priest. Thankfully, Powell and Agutter are so good that they carry the movie quite well.

The paranormal is introduced into this moody story a bit at a time, with Hemmings never going for the cheap thrill; whatever violence is in the movie is mostly done off screen. Audiences may well appreciate the incredible work that the production does in creating a crash site, and enjoy the way that things wrap up with a creepy reveal / confrontation and a nifty (if not all that original) final twist.

As was said, this may not be to every taste, but genre fans looking for more obscure efforts from decades past are advised to look into it.

Seven out of 10.

"The Survivor" is a bizarre, incomprehensible attempt at a horror story that barely registers as that or as anything at all.

The bits that one assumes are meant to be scary are merely confusing and come out of nowhere. The soundtrack signals to you that you're supposed to be scared, pummelling you with frantic music, but this is merely irritating since you can't understand what, if anything, you are supposed to be scared by.

The plot is actually fairly simple. So why is it so confusing? It's about a pilot who survives a plane crash that kills everyone else on board. He is visited by some kind of clairvoyant or something, played by Jenny Agutter, who is about as mystical in this role as the CEO of Wendy's was when he appeared in that training video (Youtube it). Her role in the plot is obvious on paper (how else is the movie going to get the supernatural bent going?), but when handled this badly, it becomes confusing and you wonder what she is there for.

The ending, I admit, was clever. It's just that everything that led up to it was so bad that it was completely wasted, like the rest of the movie was.