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!

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 . . .