Cast: Ginger Minj, Jujubee, RuPaul Review by Carol Allen
The story is loosely inspired by Airplane, the 1980 comedy which sent up the disaster movies of the previous decade. Though in this case the setting for the impending disaster is not an airplane but a runaway train caught in a hurricane.
Our heroines are train stewardesses Tess (Ginger Minj) and DeeDee (Jujubee), who find themselves promoted from dreary old Stank Rail to the glitzy, classy Glamazonian Express, which is run more like the first class section of an aeroplane. The story was originally I believe going to take its setting from the film that inspired it and when they changed it to a train some of the jokes were too good to lose.
It’s going to be an uphill struggle for Tess and DeeDee to be accepted though in this classy environment, particularly by the perfectly groomed and bitchy trio of stewardesses already installed (Symone, Brooke Lynn Hytes and Marcia Marcia Marcia), who are all high camp, perfect hair and nails, rather old fashioned glamour.
In contrast our two heroines are more like real women, particularly Ginger Minj, who would convince as a housewife shopping in Sainsbury – though with a name like that she won’t go down well with the Women’s Institute! While Jujubee as her best friend is rather sweetly vulnerable.
Once the journey gets underway the dramas and the jokes come thick and fast. In some ways it’s like a series of sketches in a tv show, some of them broad, some of them bawdy, some just witty. Where the whole thing really takes off though is when news of the possible disaster reaches the President of the United States played by RuPaul. RuPaul hosts a popular drag show on American television and is one of the creators/producers behind the film and she is really impressive – tall, black, glamorous, totally in charge and funny with it. Dunno what her policies are but she’s a distinct improvement on the orange horror who’s there at the moment.
Going back to the film’s inspiration, there’s little for me that can beat my memory of Lloyd Bridges as the stressed-out air traffic controller in Airplane with his ongoing riffs on the line ”Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.” In a different way though, RuPaul comes close.
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