Fly Me the French Way (1974)

The main character in this film, named Valerie, house-sits for her absentee cousin. She's lonely, and scared to be in the empty house by herself. So one night, she immediately summons her pal Sophie to come over, and keep her company. The two women drink vodka, and indulge in sizzling hot lesbian sex together. Valerie and Sophie have a great time with each other, until Sophie is kidnapped by a strange cult of sex-fiends. The plot then revolves around Valerie trying to find Sophie, and rescue Sophie from her captors. But not before Valerie has had a chance to enjoy prolonged, decadent sexual trysts, with various lovers.Marie-France Morel as Sophie, is the only cast member who stands-out. Marie was a good choice, to play the sensuous, yet vulnerable-looking Sophie. Pale and diminutive, Sophie seems like a waif who needs to be looked after. It's easy to see why she was the one who was snatched away in the night, by the kidnappers.Like many French films, the pace of this film was excruciatingly slow. The story-line is nearly impossible to follow. And illicit sex between the characters, seems to be the centerpiece of this movie, to the detriment of actual character and plot development. Watch this film, only if you want to see soft-core porn involving sexy-looking, lust-crazed people. If you're looking for anything more substantial than that in a film, then this movie will be very disappointing for you.

Bacchanales sexuelles (1974) * 1/2 (out of 4) Softcore sexploitation film from France has a young girl named Valerie (Joelle Coeur) watching her cousin's home for six months while he is away on a trip. The first night there she gets bored so she invites her girlfriend Sophie (Mari-France Morel) over for some lesbian sex but in the middle of the night Sophie is kidnapped and taken away by a sex crazed cult. There's really not much of a story here, although, to be honest, not many of the director's films feature any type of story. It's rather strange seeing Rollin do a film like this that features the normal lesbian sex without any vampires but later in his career he would start doing hardcore porn but I haven't watched any of those films yet. The biggest problem is that this movie is simply here to show off nudity, which is does quite a bit with the beautiful French actresses but sadly the film runs 101-minutes, which is about thirty-minutes too long. It's funny but the American release cut thirty-minutes worth of footage but the Synapse DVD is the uncut French version. The first lesbian scene is pretty hot but everything goes downhill after this. The story really doesn't make too much sense and even the sex scenes grow tiresome after a while.

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 . . .