Though most of the stars got back together for Airplane II: The Sequel, the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team passed the torch to new writer-director Ken Finkleman, who manages to reprise the style of the original quite well but is, as perhaps expected, more or less one-third as funny. The premise, alarmingly similar to the dead-straight contemporary Starflight One, is that the first commercial passenger shuttle to the moon has 2001-style computer hassles en route and finds itself headed straight through an asteroid belt into the sun. Cracked-up test pilot Robert Hays and promoted-from-stewardess technical expert Julie Hagerty have to save the day, despite panicking passengers, inept ground staff, complicated trauma flashbacks, deadpan one-liners and deliberately dodgy special effects. Leslie Nielsen is glimpsed only in footage from Airplane that sets up an extended slapping-the-hysterical-passenger gag redone (into the ground) here, but Lloyd Bridges and Stephen Stucker return as the overly-intense airport crisis controller and his happy-go-lucky gay sidekick. There are sterling cameos in the patented agonisingly serious mode from Raymond Burr (a judge), Chuck Connors (cigar-tossing fire chief), William Shatner (who gets the best sight gag) and Sonny Bono (impotent mad bomber). Back in the early 80s, it was still possible to do mild gags about paedophilia (not only Graves's chumminess with the cute kid who visits the cockpit, but also the priest looking at the centrefold of Altar Boy magazine) but aside from some incidental naked breasts, the humour is a touch cleaner than in the first film. Hays and Hagerty are better than the material, and it's all over swiftly enough--the film clocks in at 75 minutes before the slow, padded end credits--to avoid wearing out your patience. The end title promises an Airplane III, but we're still waiting. The 1.78:1 widescreen ratio of the DVD allows you to see gags in the corners of the frame that would be cropped in a full-screen transfer. --Kim Newman

The quintessential movie spoof that spawned an entire genre of parody films, the original Airplane! still holds up as one of the brightest comedic gems of the 1980s, not to mention of cinema itself (it often tops polls of the funniest movies ever made). The humour may be low and obvious at times, but the jokes keep coming at a rapid-fire clip and its targets--primarily the lesser lights of 1970s cinema, from disco films to star-studded disaster epics--are more than worthy for send-up. If you've seen even one of the overblown Airport movies then you know the plot: the crew of a filled-to-capacity jetliner is wiped out and it's up to a plucky stewardess and a shell-shocked fighter pilot to land the plane. Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty are the heroes who have a history that includes a meet-cute á la Saturday Night Fever, a surf scene right out of From Here to Eternity, a Peace Corps trip to Africa to teach the natives the benefits of Tupperware and basketball, a war-ravaged recovery room with a G.I. who thinks he's Ethel Merman (a hilarious cameo)--and those are just the flashbacks! The jokes gleefully skirt the boundaries of bad taste (pilot Peter Graves to a juvenile cockpit visitor: "Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked?"), with the high (low?) point being Hagerty's intimate involvement with the blow-up automatic pilot doll, but they'll have you rolling on the floor. The film launched the careers of collaborators Jim Abrahams (Big Business), David Zucker (Ruthless People) and Jerry Zucker (Ghost), as well as revitalising such B-movie actors as Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen, who built a second career on films like this. A vital part of any home film collection. --Mark Englehart, Amazon.com

Recorded live in London's Playhouse Theatre, My Gaff, My Rules sees Al Murray's Perrier Award-winning comic creation in top, boisterous ale-swilling form. The Pub Landlord has been compared to the likes of Alf Garnett and Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney character, but that doesn't prepare the viewer for Murray's highly developed and sophisticated lampoon of True Brit values. Since Murray has built up his following largely without the advantage of a TV profile, this represents an indispensable opportunity to see him on-screen.

Murray is merciless in coercing audiences into participation, demanding their names and professions, which generally disgust him, particularly those working in IT. One Hector, who abbreviates to "Heckie" is picked out for serial abuse by Murray, as is Jeremy the Australian ("returned to the scene of the crime, have you?") and a young woman whom he suspects of being a feminist: "trousers, job, the whole package".

Although Murray's prejudices are predictable--such as a loathing of the French--his reasons for disliking them are much less so ("They've got a town called Brest. And none of 'em think it's funny".) His powers of invention in order to justify his ludicrous bigotry leave you gasping for air. He's expanded the scope of his musings and is now able, ingeniously, to dismiss Sir Isaac Newton as a "timewaster". Meanwhile, both his use of language and onstage physical movement are surprisingly elegant. All of his strengths as a performer come together in a climactic routine in which he lambasts Germans for making everything that they say "come out funny". Murray then "proves" it with a series of Germanic nursery rhyme recitations which is a brilliantly observed virtuoso parody of cinematic Teutonic clichés. Absolutely not for boneheads. --David Stubbs