Airplane! (1980)

This is hailed as the best of the Zucker-Abrahams spoofs, packed with accurate spoofs, puns and sight gags that have not dated. The critic praises the supporting cast, especially Leslie Nielsen and the veteran actors sending up their personas, and notes how it ended the Airport series.

The critic calls it the funniest movie ever made, a single-minded barrage of gags that succeeds where earlier parodies fell short. The review singles out the sheer volume and quality of the jokes, from wordplay to visual gags, as its greatest achievement.

This is the mother of all spoofs and nobody has bettered it since in send-ups and sight gags. It is essential viewing that rewards repeat watches to catch all the jokes.

The film is sophomoric and corny but frequently very funny because of it, succeeding as a satirical anthology of movie clichés where more ambitious comedies fail to land laughs. It particularly excels in send-ups like the disco parody of Saturday Night Fever in a Casablanca-style bar flashback.

The ZAZ team sustains a single spoof premise across the whole film without losing steam, framing gags around a straight-faced remake of Zero Hour with B-movie stars delivering lines earnestly amid absurdity. It is one of the most relentlessly inventive American comedies, though it helped popularize mocking older films.

Airplane! delivers hilarious jokes with clever, confident energy and is a welcome brief, inexpensive-looking surprise amid a dim season. It effectively spoofs disaster films like Zero Hour while poking fun at broader movie clichés and authority figures with a Mad Magazine-like attitude.

Airplane! offers a huge quantity of laughs through its gag-a-second approach and layered jokes, holding up well decades later despite leading to lesser imitators. The ZAZ team's spoof of disaster films mixes parodies and wordplay effectively in its first half.

This is a laff-riot spoof that beats other films for sheer number of comic gags, leaving no cliché unturned in its takedown of the Airport-style disaster cycle. Laughs come thick and fast from the Jaws takeoff opening to the irreverent closing title card.

The film is hilarious and will be one of the year's big moneymakers. It is an outrageous, affectionate satire of disaster epics and melodramas, with strong performances and visual gags that mostly land.

The critic declares Airplane! one of the best comedies ever made and a pioneering spoof that goes far beyond parody. He singles out its freedom to try every style of joke while maintaining a cohesive tone and ensuring nearly every gag lands.

The critic calls it one of the funniest movies of all time, a brilliantly funny spoof of 1970s disaster films that packs countless laugh-out-loud moments and running gags into a lean 88 minutes without falling flat despite its star cast.

The critic calls Airplane! a foundational comedy whose revolutionary mix of density and dexterity remains unmatched forty years on. He singles out the decision to cast serious actors playing it straight as the key to its discipline and enduring power.