THE BIG BUS
A film review by Shane R. Burridge
Copyright 1995 Shane R. Burridge
(1976) 88 min
Larry Cohen took a break from his offbeat horror tales to co-write this James Frawley directed vehicle (pun intended), a parody of the disaster movies boom that surfaced in the mid-seventies. The big bus itself is the pride of the Coyote (not Greyhound) fleet, a nuclear-powered luxury transit vehicle that is about to make its inaugural run non-stop from New York to Denver. Add to this the following plot ingredients: a driver haunted by an incident from his past, a collection of eccentric passengers, a disaster which sends the vehicle out of control ... it's easy to see the similarity between THE BIG BUS and the 1980 disaster spoof AIRPLANE! (actually, there's only two minutes difference in their running times). While I find both films funny, the disconnected, rapid-fire gags of AIRPLANE! have been recycled too often by the slew of similar 'zany' takeoffs that it spawned to make it any longer unique--which leaves THE BIG BUS the more distinctive of the two, by default.
Joseph Bologna, Stockard Channing, and John Beck, as the principal crew of the bus, have to play their roles fairly straight, leaving most of the laughs to their oddball passengers, ably represented by--among others--Richard Mulligan, Ruth Gordon, and Rene Auberjonois (he's a cynical priest who beats the elderly Gordon to a window seat and smirks "Where is your God now, old woman?"). Nobody has a particularly big role--except for the bus, which really is big - but the 'star-studded' cast of familiar faces is one of the conventions of disaster movies that writers Cohen and Fred Freeman have stuck to. They have also incorporated into the plot elements of other notable disaster flicks--specifically AIRPORT, AIRPORT '75, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (!), and even a touch of EARTHQUAKE--though what's more interesting is their choice of subject. The film-makers obviously noticed the trend in these movies to place frightened-but-resourceful passengers together on any number of calamity -bound vehicles. Along with the planes and ships of the previously mentioned titles, these hapless casts have had their lives endangered by trains, airships, and even rollercoasters. A big bus was all that was left. This is, of course, absurd. The film's level of humor reminds me of a MAD magazine movie send-up (Illustrator Jack Davis was even called in to design the movie poster) and from what I've seen, its amiable, silly approach will be enjoyed by early teens more than adults. At least the producers didn't feel they had to resort to cheap innuendo and "comic" violence.
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