"Murder on flight 502" tells the story of the first class of a flight from the states to London, that receives an anonymous threat, that some of the passengers are about to be murdered throughout the trip. The pilot, the airport security and a policeman on board team up to solve the case and arrest the murderer before it is too late.The whole movie breathes the 70's. It surely wasn't produced with a very high budget and the outcome is somewhat alike. The way how the plot is built kind of reminds me of old Agatha Christie movies, where the audience is more or less trying to collect clues to find out who could be the bad guy in the end. There are some bigger logical errors in the film and generally the events don't seem to be all too realistic but if you can accept this you can actually be well entertained by the movie and have a surprisingly good time with it. The character evolution is maybe a bit foreseeable and some of the characters are brutally one-dimensional, but in exchange the film manages to keep the tension up and create some false hints that may leave some viewers surprised.All in all this is a mediocre movie, neither bad nor anything special. It is a solid 70's crime movie that you should give a try if both elements are of some interest for you and you find the general plot appealing.

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....

This film falls firmly in the So Bad You'll Love It pile of bargain-bin wonders, a TV feature film, of the type made for audiences assumed to have an IQ equivalent of a retarded chicken.The corny Dialogue reaches new heights of hilarity only matched by the Airport series, and its spoof Airplane! (Flying High). Cheap sets - an "airport lounge" that looks like the set of a cheap office where some equally cheap 70s show had just been filmed, the "aircraft" with impossibly wide expanses, giant square door, "hundreds" of passengers of which we only see a handful and sometimes the cabin seems empty, the TWO, yes TWO stewardesses, disappearing passengers (Danny Bonaduce stops appearing in the cabin half way through) a cockpit where nothing ever seems to happen except hilarious radio exchanges, a plane that takes off and in the next shot is shown landing (different models, different colour schemes even used in consecutive shots of the supposed airliner taking off), not to mention the impossibly ridiculous "script". Its hard to believe that this film was intended to be taken seriously. One of the priceless lines (about a bogus priest who wears nail polish - what???!!!)comes from a psychologist attempting to analyse why someone would impersonate a priest: "A clinical manifestation of religious hysteria!" - I kid you not. See it and prepare to laugh yourself silly.

If you've seen Airplane!, enjoyed Airplane! and perhaps wondered where Airplane! got some of its inspiration from, check out Murder on Flight 502. My brother found it for the astounding price of one dollar American, and for that single bill you get Robert Stack, Farrah Fawcett, Sonny Bono, and...Danny Bonaduce? Oh, but yes. And there's more. As the film tepidly moves along, begging you to find the murderer among the passengers before anyone is actually murdered, you'll be treated to outrageous mid-70's fashion (brown is IN!), bizarre character backgrounds, and the hottest burgeoning romance this side of Harold and Maude, an elderly Jewish woman and an elderly Methodist known only as Uncle Charlie. "Ah...I know half the story already!" says the elderly woman slyly after Uncle Charlie introduces himself, and believe me, you will know every sundry detail of Uncle Charlie's hard knock life, even though it's probably better that you didn't.You will see Sonny Bono sing, and you will realize why Cher was much better on her own. Robert Stack will make Bruce Willis in Die Hard look bad with his endless barrage of hard-boiled, sarcastic one-liners. But most of all, you will figure out who the murderer is, and you will be satisfied when they get their comeuppance.No, there is no singing stewardess, no jive-talkers, no inflatable auto-pilot, no Leslie Neilsen. But unless you are unable to mock the earnest, but futile work of many to make a taut murder mystery shot almost entirely on a plane full of large, orange seats, you will like Murder on Flight 502. I promise.