Very well executed

Brilliant and touching

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Cheesy and common to the times, still there's a nostalgia to watching these old flicks from the 70's, it was worth the watch for that alone. A little snapshot of the bad/campy/predictable TV of the day, but somehow fun anyway. As for holes and errors in the scenes, one could pick apart all the discrepancies, and most been done here. I'd add that I've never been on a flight, nor seen one from those days where all the seats are oriented backwards to the nose of the plane, not to mention the rest of the seat layout, fanning in towards the aisle as they do. Maybe they did, but first class, flying backwards the whole way? Might make some people more ill if they're prone to that. Some mention the variation in quantity of passengers in some scenes (coming and going of passengers), but there's the bathrooms, and not staying in your seat would be normal back in the good old days when a lounge was available, though they showed the lounge mostly empty when shown at all. (I'm all for bringing the lounge back, especially for long flights). "Skyjackings", as they were called, were in the news a fair bit in those days, yet dogs seemed to do just fine in deterring trouble, no need for today's excess. If only people could watch the news these days with as discerning an eye for discrepancies as they do with films, they may notice a few things. At any rate, a good little film if you want the flavor of how that genre of TV was back then....

TITLE: MURDER ON FLIGHT 502 was release in theaters in the United States on November 21 1975 and it takes 100 minutes to watch this movie. Murder On Flight 502 is a 1975 made-for-TV movie starring Robert Stack, Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Sonny Bono, Danny Bonaduce, and Fernando Lamas - After a Boeing 747-100 takes off from New York City to London, a mysterious note turns up at the airport stating that passengers aboard the flight will be killed before the Boeing 747-100 lands on Heathrow. This creates a twist on the classic whodunit suspense format that may be described as "Who's going to do it to whom?" — as all of the quirky passengers seem like potential culprits and/or victims. At first, the note is brushed off as a prank, but the plot thickens considerably once passengers do begin turning up murdered. Peter Graves plays the airplane's Captain, and would go on to play the same role as Captain Oveur in 1980's Airplane! Robert Stack also appears in that movie as a Captain.SUMMARY: With a noteworthy cast of film and television stars, that includes Farrah Fawcett, Sony Bono, Ralph Bellamy, Robert Stack, and Fernando Lamas, this thrilling whodunit reaches true heights of terror. As a 747 jumbo jet departs from New York en route to London, an ominous letter is found in the first class lounge of Kennedy Airport stating that a series of murders will take place on board the flight before it lands. Initially dismissed as a twisted joke, the threat becomes all too real when the first body is found. However, it is only after the discovery of a second victim that the clues begin to reveal the motives behind the deaths. The list of suspects implicates both passengers and crew as the captain and a police detective attempt to piece together the mounting evidence and unveil the homicidal maniac before he strikes again.MY THOUGHTS: All and all the weasel gives this movie 8 star. As far as Farrah Fawcett Majors goes, she did a great job at being the flight attendant in charge.

This is one of several movies that surely inspired the 1980 Jim Abrahams-David Zucker-directed disaster movie spoof Airplane!. But being a cheap made-for-TV affair this has to be the worst, although boasts an impressive cast.It's all here: the cheap sets, the phony dialogue, the over-applied make-up (too much eye-liner and tinted hair and thats just the guys) and the stereotypical characters all with their own personal demons to deal with. The gin-swigging, hard-bitten crime writer, the grief stricken parents, the old guy with months to live, the jive-talking pop star (Sonny Bono sporting a hideous shirt and massive flares), the rugged, no-nonsense Captain (Robert Stack - amazingly also in Airplane!), the glamorous stewardess (a pre-Charlie Angels Farah Fawcett-Majors), the guy who has a heart attack but refuses to be treated by the only doctor on board because he blames him for his wife's death, the practical joke-playing precocious kid (Danny Bonaduce from The Partridge family) and the harassed ground staff including the airport manager with an air disaster AND toothache to deal with, and the psychologist bought in to give a profile of the passengers who gets more and more unconvincingly disheveled as the movie proceeds (see Lloyd Bridges in Airplane!).Without giving too much away the most jaw-dropping moments are the corny dialogue between the Captain and the cabin staff (all two of 'em), the sequence where it's revealed that the priest is an imposter because he's wearing nail polish (nail polish?) and the bit where Robert Stack promises to show Danny Bonaduce round his cockpit a few minutes after threatening to spank him. But the most memorable scene is where a bomb-disposal officer (Pepper Martin) arrives in the airport departure lounge to diffuse a bomb which turns out to be a hoax. He sports some rather unwieldy protective clothing which he clearly didn't wear during rehearsals (assuming they did any) as he bumps into a pot plant when he exits. He also has some of the worst lines in the movie: "I was in a motel room when I got this call. I thought it was my wife!". Watch it at your peril!

What do you get when you combine The Airport Movies with Murder, She Wrote? You get this rather pedestrian movie of the week. This film has all the traits of this kind of film, actors on the downside of their careers giving lousy performances and a rather unbelievable plot line. The only thing that you can say about this film is that we get to see a pre-Charlie's Angels Farrah Fawcett and that's it.