Fly Me the French Way (1974)

Just perfect...

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Writer/director Jean Rollin departs from his vampire and zombie movies to give us some soft-core porn with very little story. In fact, the most amazing thing about this film was that it had three writers. There was so little dialog, that the script could have been written on the back of an envelope.But, we are not here to see a fancy story, we are here to see Joëlle Coeur, who I first discovered in Schoolgirl Hitchhikers. And, we do get to see Coeur - all of her, every inch, nothing left to the imagination, with her girlfriend, with a guy, with the guy and another girl in the tub, covered with jam, covered with soap, Oh My god! And it is not just Coeur we see, but her girlfriend Sophie (Marie-France Morel), the high priestess Malvina (Brigitte De Borghese), Jenny (Agnès Lemercier), and Brigette (Annie Belle). There were many more at the cast party at the end, but they are not important.If you are looking for some campy fun in the vein of the 70s grindhouse action, this is the way the French do it. Oh mon dieu!

Jean Rollin takes a departure here from his usual vampire/lesbian trope and tries to make (I think) a comic book adventure porno. So you need three things here...wacky (or at least larger than life) characters, a plot filled with some excitement and regular segments of squeaky bed action.The sex is abundant although rarely titillating in the sense that most viewers of this type of film would want. It's also deeply problematic in more than one place. A guy gets into bed with a woman he thinks is someone else, she tells him to back off at least twice, but his persistence leads to a full on shag...we also have a prisoner later who consents to sex because the guy says he's a friend...oh, alright then...I mean come on.There's a scene of some surrealist interest when the priestess/female villain is shooting mannequins outside the mansion but visually that's it, seriously, there is nothing else.Also worthy of note for just how horrendous a piece of crap this is are the half-arsed credits that make no sense and look awful.The word pretentious gets banded around too much by people who don't know what the word actually means. This is pretentious. It pretends to be something that it quite painfully isn't. So what is it? Well its shagging most of the time and this is rarely done well, those that are making noise fling themselves around as though the script required them to have a seizure, those that aren't look bored.Do not bother with this film, it's not so bad it's good, it's just plain awful. If you want some screen nooky then just buy a porno and if you're looking for some decent Jean Rollin try anything else apart form this...

There are two ways to approach this movie. If you're looking for a softcore porn knock-off you will no doubt find it very strange, but you probably won't be disappointed. If you're a Jean Rollin fan though you won't find it strange enough, and you probably will be. The problem with this movie is that it is VERY heavily padded with the typical boring, mechanical softcore grinding scenes. It's not that this detracts from the plot--this is a Rollin film after all with the usual deliciously bizarre if completely inconsequential story--but it does take away from the strangely beautiful images and haunting atmosphere that characterize the director's best work. Rollin seemed to realize this and used a pseudonym on the film, even before it was retitled "Fly Me the French Way" (what the hell does that mean, anyway?) and had some pre-credit sequence from what is obviously a completely different movie slapped onto it. I do have to take exception with some of the previous reviews which claim the women in this movie aren't attractive. So these French actresses need to shave their armpits, they're still preferable to the ridiculously over-sized silicone breasts attached to anorexic American "actresses" who are obviously just punching the clock when they're doing sex scenes. Call me un-American . . .

Oh, those crazy Frenchies! They love to inject art in everything.. even soft-core porn. O.K, i kid, but seriously look at the opening title sequence. You'll know what I mean. Valerie goes to her cousin's mansion. Her cousin is vacationing in America. So she invites her friend , Sophie, over. They get it on. As they're sleeping 2 thiefs brake in and kidnap Sophie. Who are these mysterious people? What does all this have to do with Valerie's cousin? Will French woman ever shave?? Will you care? I don't like to post major spoilers, so I can only answer my last two questions...NOPE. For Jean Rollin fans only. All others steer clear. My Grade: C-