Airwolf: The Movie

Introduction

Early 80's television combined with adolescence, a bit of a potent mix. Especially when you add in the big US exports such as Blue Thunder, The A-Team, Street Hawk, Auto-Man, Knight Rider etc. I watched them all as they came and went, some to return much later and in slightly different form. Thing is though, if you discount The A-Team (which was an elusive band of warriors fighting for justice - a similar theme to all of the above) then the common denominator was technology and the real star of this series was the vehicles used and the technology incorporated to make them much superior as crime fighting weapons than anything previous. The 80's was very much the decade of computer technology with the appearance of the first real home computers and the general feeling that the mastering of technology was within our grasp.

And so to Airwolf, yet another from the Donald P.Bellisario stable. In 1983 Blue Thunder strode across our cinema screens with Roy Schneider at the joystick in a rather over the top Police helicopter that looked suspiciously like a tank with rotor blades. I'm guessing that in 1984 Bellisario thought he could make this work on TV in a slightly different format, although Blue Thunder the TV series also appeared that year. Airwolf would potentially have a much wider palette to draw from than Blue Thunder as it was an instrument of the CIA (still thought of as good in this pre-Oliver North world) and therefore would be involved in the slightly sexier world of espionage rather than just chasing bank robbers every week.

Airwolf begins with some final testing in the desert in front of an influential Senator from some oversight committee, co-ordinated by Agency chief Archangel (Alex Cord). Piloting the sleek Airwolf chopper is inventor Dr Charles Moffat (David Hemmings), a man with a penchant for torturing and murdering young women but whose activities are overlooked by the Agency in return for his expertise. Airwolf is a rather sleek looking helicopter that can travel at Mach 1 and has 14 different weapons systems to hand, including both 30mm cannon and nuclear tipped missles. Which explains why Libyan dictator Kaddaffi (ooh, subtle...) has paid Moffat an awful lot to steal it to help him bolster his influence with neighbouring Arabic countries. Being a bit of an evil dude and a show-off, Moffat can't just steal the helicopter, he has to show everyone how good it is before trying to kill them all...

Archangel manages to survive the ensuing carnage with nothing more serious than a broken arm and an eyepatch (arrr, Jim lad...), and moves to the only other person to have flown the flying killing machine to steal it back, Vietnam vet and all-round moody silent type Stringfellow Hawke (Jan-Michel Vincent). Hawke is really a bit of a sensitive guy, serenading a female eagle from the pier of his secluded wooden hut with a cello. Archangel realises that Hawke will take some convincing and so brings along female love interest in the shape of Gabrielle (Belinda Bauer), but understimates him a little. For whilst Hawke and Belinda get it on, Hawke is not interested in the million dollars offered to complete the job. No, he wants the return of his brother St John, who is MIA after being shot down in Vietnam whilst on the same mission as Hawke. This appears to concern the Agency committee who sanction such things, who then p*** off Hawke further by nicking his grandfathers extensive art collection. And so with buddy Dominic Santini (Ernest Borgnine) as back-up, it's to Libya we go...

Picture/Sound

I can't believe how much attention they're given to the picture prior to placing it on the high-end of digital media, or rather the fact they really couldn't be f***ing bothered (ooh, I can drop swearwords into reviews as well to make them seem more grown up). I can't remember ever being as disappointed with a blu-ray as this one. Generally the picture is a little better, even if not to the maximum possible on this media. It's bad enough that I'm having to watch in 4:3 but just where did they get the source material for this? Was it the original VHS tape? There's an abundance of grain to an altogether overly soft picture, the blacks are terrible and ruin the darker scenes, and you don't even want to know about the vast amount of stock footage that most 80's action series used to cut back on costs...

The 2.0 Stereo mix is rather muted overall, although the stirring theme tune still gets the pulse racing. There are no subtitles, quelle surprise, but also rather annoyingly there's dubbed profanity within one scene that seems to have pushed the rating of this up to 18. Apparently this happened with a much earlier release of the same material and Fabulous Films haven't bothered to put it back to the way it should. Still, there's a kind of natural justice here as in my view anyone who buys an 18 certificate blu-ray of Airwolf (or any 80's TV series of the ilk I described above) deserves what they get when they finally get to see it as they clearly don't have much intelligence.

Extras

I don't normally talk about the disc menu's but I'm going to here. What on earth were they thinking over at Fabulous Films? I can understand the use of a 4:3 menu card given the state of the actual footage but whose idea was it to use soft orchestral music as opposed to the pulsating Sylvester Levay theme tune. If you throw on an Airwolf disc, you want to hear the bloody theme tune, god dammit...

Oh, and there's an image gallery of shots from across the entire series so not even that is relevant to this particular release. Lazy...

Overall

Good grief. I was really looking forward to this, especially on blu-ray. One of the iconic images I always carried with me from Airwolf was the eagle serenading session with the cello and I really wanted to see it in high definition. And despite having a blu-ray disc in my player, I ended up with grainy VHS footage instead. This makes me rather mad. I honestly thought that bad transfers were a think of the past. You could get away to a degree with VHS to DVD transfers in the early days of DVD, but VHS to Blu-ray? Are you taking the p***? Just what is the bloody point?

That spoilt it for me in such a big way that I wasn't sure if I was going to give the actual story a chance. But I did. This is really a typical 80's story and is essentially the pilot episode for the series, although split in two for the series itself. Something has always bugged me regarding US pilot shows. Very few actually seemed to be shown as feature-length episodes, although that is clearly what they were, rather split into the first two episodes of the run, presumably so as not to mess up the schedules too much. But then there was a tendency to then release them as a single edit to either the cinema (see the original Battlestar Galactica) or the growing VHS market (as done here).

I always thought of Jan-Michel Vincent as the silent type before I realised that he couldn't actually act and later discovered he had a rather dubious reputation with the women and the bottle. Still, he's backed up by a rather fabulous actor in Ernest Borgnine who was always my favourite in this, although he looks just baffled by all the buttons in the helicopter here. Belinda Bauer is fine as a temporary love interest but the styling of the Agency was what kind of caught my eye initially. Clearly the world has moved on from the time where everyone thought the CIA was the saviour of the world during the Cold War, but the naming of the chief as Archangel and the Agency dress code of all-white was rather enticing for me as a youngster. The adding of the eye patch to Cord's character simply finishing off a rather powerful image. Despite some of Archangel's finagling, it really was good guys versus bad guys.

David Hemmings plays the 80's villain role in a rather camp way, styling himself after Valentino's The Sheikh and adding little touches that make him seem quite mad rather than just evil for the sake of it. With his on-screen antics and being the all-purpose bad guy, you'd hope for a suitable death for him but in reality whilst it's very missile intensive, it's not that satisfying and pretty abrupt. Everyone knows that villains need to be seen screaming to their deaths such as Alan Rickman in Die Hard or John Lithgow in Cliffhanger. And the ending is too abrupt. What happened to the final scene where everyone settles down and agreements/relationships are laid in place that will then form the basis of the ongoing series? It's not as if they outstayed their welcome with only 82 minutes on the clock.

Dammit. Another 80's classic ruined. Think I need to just throw away those rose-tinted glasses before I become completely disillusioned...