Fly Me

Movies like Fly Me aren't to be taken seriously. They are to be watched without thinking..the bad martial arts choreography and the nudity helps distract you from the bad acting and storyline. This movie is fun if you want a good laugh and to see what a great example of 70s sexploitation is.

You get a strong hint early on that this is probably not going to be a good movie when it clearly says (right there in the opening credits) "directed by Ciro Santiago". But compared to the rest of the oeuvre of the infamous Filipino exploitation hack, this is actually not too bad. It's a slight improvement over the similar Santiago film "Cover Girl Models" and it's definitely better than a lot of his other swill like "Vampire Hookers".

This is a "stewardess-spolitation" flick focusing on the various misadventures of a trio of sexy American stewardesses in the Far East. The main story, featuring Lenore Kasdorf, is similar to "Cover Girl Models" with a mixture of half-ass spy antics and half-ass kung-fu fighting. The second story is pure comedy as the Italian-stereotype mother of the newest and most virginal stewardess (Pat Anderson)has tagged along on the trip and goes to great lengths to stop her bubble-headed daughter from getting together with a handsome "bone doctor". The third story though is actually quite sleazy, approaching something out of the European "Black Emanuelle' series, as the third stewardess (Lillah Toreno)gets involved in drug trafficking and falls into the hands of a white-slavery group and ends up tied-up naked and even raped at one point (off-screen).

The dramatic shifts in tone here may be kind of off-putting to those expecting just a sexy, light-hearted romp, but they also serve to make the film more interesting than the usual "stewardess-spolitation" fare (it's especially interesting the way Santigo eventually manges to tie these three disparate plot-lines together). The female cast here is generally strong. Lenore Kasdorf was a familiar TV actress in the 70's, so it's fun to see her in somewhat racier fare. Lillah Toreno, on the other hand, was pretty much exclusively known for sleazy fare like the Gary Graver softcore porn "roughie", "And When She Was Bad". Pat Anderson appeared mostly in other films like this--the two most famous being Santiago's "Cover Girl Models" and the New World favorite "Summer School Teachers". The male cast is less memorable, but the ubiquitous Dick Miller appears in the early scene as a cab driver who repeatedly runs off the road while Anderson's character changes out of her bikini in the back of his cab, and the ever slimy Victor Diaz plays a corrupt Asian official. On the downside, the movie is even more horribly cheap than usual--we know we're supposedly in the Tokyo Airport at one point only because "Tokyo Airport" is written on a frickin' chalkboard in the background! Still, for the stewardess-sploitation genre, this is slightly above average.

So-called martial arts scenes look like something some teenagers may do pretending to be karate experts. Plot virtually non-existent. Barely watchable grade Z film. There is zero reason to watch this unless you are a specialty 70s film buff (like I am) or are interesting in the nudity.

There are a lot of elements in this film, which you normally don't see in a single movie, for the good reason that they usually don't go together in a satisfactory way; but here, they work fairly well, especially in the sense that they capture a number of themes from the 1970's.

You need to be patient in watching this movie! The pacing is often slow by American standards, and the plot twists are often only minimally explained, if at all. In that, and in other ways, this resembles the Euro-spy films of the 1960's. So, why watch it?

The three stewardesses are all good looking, and they aren't shy about displaying their impressive charms in this film. Lenore Kasdorf and Pat Anderson have the best roles. Lenore shows not only her beauty, but her impressive acting skills, which were to lead her to a long and successful Hollywood career. Pat does well in a role that has a comic emphasis, and she is very endearing, and believable. She comes across as very natural. The actress playing Pat's mom is highly accomplished and funny, and had me laughing out loud. Her first-rate acting helps this movie, a lot.

The movie has scenes that are humorous, sometimes shocking--sexploitation-wise--and with some kung fu type action. The kung fu is pretty mild stuff, but at least the movie is trying; one of the three girls has had a lot of kung fu training, though that background of hers is never explained.

There are some nice visuals of Hong Kong, which are colorful and fun.

When he started New World Pictures, one of Roger Corman's earliest successes was with the Nurses series of films. Starting with Stephanie Rothman's "The Student Nurses" in 1970, he made a series of light sexploitation films that would follow 4 young women, each with a separate plotline that included topical elements and nudity in films that managed to combine sexploitation with women's liberation. By 1973, he had made four of these, and was looking to take the idea in new directions. Stewardesses are an obvious choice.

Corman was also starting to make films in the Philippines. Jack Hill's early women in prison films had been shot there, and a country that had an existing film industry that was a lot cheaper than the US was attractive. He struck a multi-film production deal with Philippine producer/director Cirio H. Santiago, and this was the first film they made.

This film drops one character from the formula, and we follow three stewardesses very conveniently flying to Southeast Asia on a trip that ends in the Philippines. New stewardess Pat Anderson finds that her mother (Naomi Stevens) has bought a ticket and is accompanying her to keep an eye on her. She tries to romance young doctor Richard Young, while her mother gets in the way and complains about the food. The other two, Lenore Kasdorf and Lyllah Torena, run afoul of sex traffickers. By the end, both plots converge, leading to one issue with the film ... the comedic subplot crashes headlong into the sex trafficking plot resulting in a really abrupt shift in tone.

Generally, this one doesn't really work. It's an early experiment in making essentially a Philippine film disguised as an American one and the seams really show. It feels like entire scenes that might connect parts of the plot together just weren't shot, and some scenes seem to have been shot much later and just patched in. There's an opening sequence involving Dick Miller as a cab driver that was shot in LA by Curtis Hanson, and Jonathan Demme's directorial debut was shooting a really terrible martial arts sequence that's dropped in mid-film (and never really explained.

Santiago made more films for Corman and they are all better than this one, including another pass at the Nurses formula involving models. Philippine exploitation icon Vic Diaz pops up as a police man.