The ultimate disaster film parody. A nuclear powered bus is going Non-stop from New York to Denver and is plagued by disasters due to the machinations of a mysterious group allied with the Oil lobby. When the driver is injured a washed up, down on his luck, but used to be great type, who as it happens, used to be engaged to the inventor's daughter is brought in to drive the giant bus which includes a one lane swimming pool and a one lane bowling alley. Is this the ancestor of all "Naked Airplane"-type spoof-a-second pictures? If so, why isn't it better known? Because this is one of the great screen satires. And it refuses to beat you over the head for laughs. Movie buffs will groove and regroove on the references to "serious" disaster flicks, but civilians won't be needing your narration to have great fun. Serious-looking Joe Bologna is the perfect choice for the lead role, which he masterfully underplays. The whole cast is superb. Composer David Shire keeps the score "dramatic", too. (Why wasn't his terrific soundtrack ever released?) I don't think "The Big Bus" was a box-office success at first release, though there was an initial publicity splash. (Four years later, "Airplane" [same premise, if more surreal] becomes the definitive put-on flick. Go figure.) Why not just turn off the monitor right now and go rent "The Big Bus"? I predict you'll become a regular passenger aboard the Coyote Cyclops, nonstop between New York and Denver. The popularity of the disaster movie in the early seventies meant that it was only a matter of time before someone attempted to parody the genre. Probably the funniest disaster movie parody is "The Cassandra Crossing", but that was intended to be a serious film and only counts as a parody because it was so badly made. The best-known deliberate disaster movie spoof is "Airplane" from 1980, but four years earlier there was "The Big Bus". The opening voice-over makes it clear what the film's targets are, as there are obvious implied references to "The Poseidon Adventure", "Earthquake", "The Towering Inferno" and "The Hindenburg".<br/><br/>The plot concerns the maiden journey (from New York to Denver) of the world's first nuclear powered bus and the attempts that are made to sabotage it on behalf of the oil industry. "Straight" disaster movies are often based around the concept of a motley collection of people, brought together by chance, who are forced to work together by the threatened disaster. "The Big Bus" seizes hold of this concept and takes it to the limit. The passengers include a priest who has lost his faith (his arguments in favour of atheism include the claim that a just God would have given the devout old lady next to him a window seat rather than an aisle seat), an about-to-be-divorced couple who bicker constantly when they are not trying to seduce one another, and a man who has only six months to live and constantly reminds everyone of the fact.<br/><br/>The crew are just as eccentric as the passengers; Dan the driver (who is also the ex-boyfriend of the bus's female designer) is a suspected cannibal, although he defends himself by claiming that he only ever ate a single foot. ("You eat one lousy foot and they call you a cannibal. What a world!") The co-driver (named "Shoulders" because of an unfortunate tendency to drive on the shoulders of the road) also has an even more unfortunate tendency to fall asleep at the wrong moment, including while driving. There is also a scantily-dressed stewardess named (satirising the American fondness for double-barrelled Christian names) Mary-Jane-Beth-Sue and an appallingly tactless and tasteless piano player.<br/><br/>Some of the humour in "The Big Bus" comes from sending up the conventions of the genre, such as exaggeratedly portentous music or the scene (probably inspired by "The Poseidon Adventure") where Dan has to rescue his ex-girlfriend Stockard Channing from drowning in soft drinks. Its targets, however, range wider than the confines of the disaster genre. The faithless priest Father Kudos, for example, is an obvious reference to Father Karras in "The Exorcist", and the use of the opening theme from Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" may echo its earlier use in Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey". The scene where the bus is left seesawing on the edge of a cliff is taken from the ending to "The Italian Job". Indeed, the film's range of targets is not confined to the cinema. The constant mentions of cannibalism seem to be a reference to Piers Paul Read's book "Alive!", about a plane crash in the Andes, which was a bestseller in the seventies but which was not made into a film until 1993.<br/><br/>Perhaps it was this scattergun approach, firing off its satirical bullets in all directions, which meant that I did not find the film particularly funny. It might have worked better if it had concentrated on sending up the disaster genre and had not tried to cram in so many extra targets. When you are aiming at so many targets, you need to hit them all, and too many of the bullets are either duds or fly harmlessly wide. For every funny joke there are several unfunny ones. As I watched this film, I couldn't help thinking that it would had been a lot better if Mel Brooks, the master of the parody, had been the director. 4/10
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295 weeks ago