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(From Joe Bob's Ultimate B Movie Guide) |
 A terrorist named Abdul skyjacks every "Tonight Show" fill-in
guest since 1967, including Joey Bishop, Martin Balsam, Lainie Kazan,
George Kennedy, Susan Strasberg, Bo Svenson, and, of course, the Queen of
Jello Pudding herself-- Shelley Winters. Robert Forster steals the movie
as Abdul the greasy terrorist, who constantly uses bad grammar and makes
everybody live in smelly places and wears some really disgusting silk
shirts until Chuck Norris can paste his Arab hiney with exploding
missiles. In this drive-in classic directed by Menahem Golan, we've
basically got an Airport ripoff with higher stakes, starting with Lainie
Kazan and Shelley Winters buying a bunch of schlock souvenirs in the
Athens airport and having a Whine-Off (Shelley wins decisively) while
their husbands compare matzo-ball soup prices. That Abdul and his buddy
Mustafa show up and start yelling "I am tekking over airplane. You weel
cooperate. Thees ees hijack. Do you heeeeeer me?" Meanwhile, back at the
Pentagon, Robert "Man from U.N.C.L.E." Vaughn is rubbing his chin and
saying, "If Lee Marvin is sober, send him over there to shoot up the plane
and get all the taxpaying Americans out. No, on second though, just send
his eyebrows." But then the Army finds out Lee Marvin has cut his eyebrows
back to only two feet long, and so he has to take Chuck Norris and about
40 dogfaces with him. Then there's a lotta plot where Abdul puts Ku Klux
Klan hoods on everybody and sticks em in the PLO Hotel, and Lee and Chuck
have to ride all over creation and get out the pontoon boats and sneak
through the sewers and go out in the Israeli desert and shoot up a bunch
of camouflage dummies--until Big Chuck discovers the one way to beat the
Arabs is to buy a Kawasaki and put nuclear guided missiles on it. Pretty
soon we got little piles of Arab mustache hair all over Beirut. One gallon blood. Six beasts. 91 dead bodies. Two motor vehicle chases, with crash-and-burns. Garroting. Fireball City. Exploding copter. Exploding truck. Thirteen exploding Jeeps. Five exploding buildings. Exploding dune buggy. Exploding Mercedes. Exploding Abdul. Gratuitous exploding watermelons. Gratuitous message from the Ayatollah. Kung Fu. Grenade Fu Bazooka Fu Motorbike Rocket Fu. Shelley Winters Fu. Shelley Winters Screaming Fu. Shelley Winters Screaming and Screwing Up Her Face Fu. Beirut Fu. Jew Fu. With George Kennedy as a 350-pound Catholic priest who says "I'm a Jew, too, just like Jesus"; Hanna Schygulla as the stewardess who says "No! Not me! I can't pick the Jews! Can't you see I'm GERMAN!"; and David Menahem, as Mustafa, who wears an extremely bad mustache and says "American marines bomb my pipple!" Best line in the movie is spoken by one of the wounded and bleeding passengers: "Not a LOCAL hospital, I hope?" 
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