There's the danger with a comedy like Soul Plane that if you decry it, you might be seen as just piling on. But as I sat through the film, two individuals kept running through my head like a stock ticker: Melvin Van Peebles, who fought for the African-American artist to have a voice in American films, and Bill Cosby, who recently spoke at events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. the Board of Education. If they were dead, they'd be spinning in their graves, but they're not, and so I'm going to presume that they wish they were. While Van Peebles has mostly been forgotten in the United States, Cosby and his sharp criticism of the black underclass and the hip-hop culture were derided for perpetuating the same racist line that some Caucasian bigots use to justify their own ignorance.

Van Peebles and Cosby come from a strong, unimpeachable history of supporting black causes, putting their money where their mouths are and their asses on the line--without hesitation and without fail. They've earned their outrage. When a movie like Soul Plane oozes through into the public consciousness, gaining mainstream distribution and at least a perfunctory advertising campaign, it speaks to something extraordinarily disturbing in our popular culture. It's not equality when the white marketing machine kicks into gear to promote this film, when the white production mechanism antes up to see it made. In fact, it's the same old song of the south, as it were: the sanctioning of black folks singing and playing the fool for the amusement of white people. And worse, it's the folks of colour writing, directing, and consenting to star in these degrading vehicles.

After Nashawn (Chris Tucker wannabe Kevin Hart) gets his ass stuck in an airplane toilet, he successfully sues for a hundred-million bones and starts his own airline based around the precepts of what appears to be the filmmakers' idea of the African-American dream. Rims, bling, booty, horny underage white girls, and contraband of every description--when a black man gets rich, says Soul Plane, he's going to blow it on bad business ideas and the kind of racial and gender stereotypes that demean everyone. The white people in the film are the Hunkees (pronounced "Honkeys"), played by Tom Arnold, Missi Pyle, Arielle Kebbel, and Ryan Pinkston. Dad is impotent, mom is obsessed with the brothers' sexual equipment, big sis is a nymphomaniac engaged, it's suggested, in pleasuring a football team as well as the crew of an aircraft carrier, and little bro embraces hip-hop culture through a jogging suit and pidgin ebonics. The story, such as it is, centres around the maiden flight of NWA (Nashawn Wade Airlines, natch)--hinting in the process at what Airplane! would be like if it were not funny, not sardonic, and peopled entirely with ethnic caricatures.

Make no mistake, there isn't a trace of racial satire in this film. Soul Plane is about trafficking in absurd, insulting race gags (black and white) for the amusement of a minority audience whom the jerks distributing this garbage hope won't realize that nobody's laughing with them. This is a movie where women--especially Latin women--are sex objects, where black people are opportunistic, grasping, criminal miscreants, and where Caucasians are boring. The humour ranges from the fact that the plane has hydraulics to the gag that NWA's terminal is called "Terminal Malcolm X."  The picture has no shame, insulating itself in the fact of its urban cool so that a running gag of the open hatred expressed towards an Arab passenger locates itself as the only ironic thing about the whole mess. It's racial profiling and an open endorsement of bigotry in a film directed by a Latino and starring a cast of African-Americans with the balls to namedrop Malcolm X in a movie brimming with hate for African-Americans. How best to explain a film this mean-spirited, this unfunny--this dispiriting? Ask Cosby. He's got a right to rage--and maybe to weep--at what a measure of opportunity, hard won and precious, has wrought.

MGM DVD presents Soul Plane in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer bursting with the purples and blues in which director Jessy Terrero has steeped his movie. It's thick in here, and not just for the doth-protest-too-much homophobia and rampant sleaziness, but the colours are well delineated and sharp, for what it's worth. Edge-enhancement problems enter towards the middle of the piece in a few smoky interiors, not that how it was mastered for DVD ranks high on my list of grievances with Soul Plane. A Dolby Digital 5.1 audio mix is curiously strained, with dialogue crowding the centre channel enough that it begins to sound distant and even tinny (particularly during Mo'nique's endless hootchie-mama riffs)--a big no-no in the era of digital fidelity. Seriously, what'd they loop it with? A tape recorder? Music booms, though, providing for the bulk of channel separation and LFE activity.

Loaded with special features because it needs to earn its money back in home video sales, Soul Plane comes advertised as the "Mile-High Edition" and "Unrated and Out of Control" with "Five Extra Minutes of Racy, Hilarious Footage!"* Alas, having missed the flick during its brief theatrical run, I can't vouch for it being either racier or more hilarious in this form, but it bears saying that I feel for people who saw a less racy, less hilarious version of this gas-trap. The festivities begin with a film-length yakker featuring Arnold, Hart, Terrero, Gary Anthony Williams, and Godfrey that is long on the guys laughing like idiots and ribbing one another (Hart the key victim, mainly for his shortness). The homophobia of the pic seeps into the commentary as the participants exhort Williams to do the track in his "heterosexual voice" in case viewers think he's really the gay manqué he plays in the film, while all join in to speculate about whether a woman's ass is her real ass and if white women really do covet the black man's package. In other words, it doesn't take too much sleuthing to discover the rancid pit at the heart of this flick. A 26-minute making-of doc called "Boarding Pass: The Making of Soul Plane" is a hyper-extended B-reel and junket exercise that holds no secrets and offers no surprises. "The Upgrade" (5 mins.) is the cast going on about director Terrero as if he were the next Welles, leading to the dual recognition that the only thing worse than this cast reading a script is this cast going off the cuff. I don't know what to think of Snoop Dogg and Method Man discussing Terrero's directorial strategies--I'm thinking it's best to avoid dwelling on it altogether.

Four deleted scenes suggest that there was actually an editorial process involved in bringing Soul Plane to the screen. One elision extends Tom Arnold's defecation scene, while another suggests that black folks only talk sense when they're high on weed. The third pokes some more fun at gays, and the last gives Snoop the stage while the underage white girl goes on about the size of black cockpits. Funny, no. Two minutes of outtakes are pretty much actors incapable of keeping a straight face even though nothing particularly funny is going on. The complete "Survivor" video played in the film is offered in its entirety; 48 behind-the-scenes stills, a "Def Jam" video game trailer, an MGM promo reel, and trailers for this film, Barbershop 2, Barbershop, and National Lampoon's Dorm Daze round out the perversely packed disc, which comes in a purple keepcase.-Walter Chaw

*Soul Plane's original R-rated cut is also available on DVD with a separate set of supplements.