AKA International Stewardesses Supersonic Supergirls Directed by Al Siliman Jr Starring Christina Hart, Paula Erikson, Angelique de Moline, Kathy Ferrick Rated X USA Buy poster
Shot in nine days (on weekends, over the course of a year and half, but still) for a budget of $40,000, The Stewardesses went on to gross over $6 million dollars in it's initial theatrical run, a monumental feat for any film in the late 1960's, never mind a grubby, X-rated 3D softcore flick. Once the buzz had set in for this one, people lined around blocks, snarling traffic for miles, just to see it. This would give you the impression that it was worth seeing. That's the bitch about buying a movie ticket, though. They won't give you your money back, just because the film is terrible. I am quite sure that the exit was just as busy as the entrance when The Stewardesses came to town in 1970.
The title alone suggests a bawdy, youthful romp, with tits and laughs, and perhaps a hammy gay dude in a neckerchief or a fat kid on a too-small bicycle. It makes you think of films like The Cheerleaders (1970) or The Student Teachers (1973) or Night Call Nurses (1972), or even Naughty Stewardesses (1974), films with colorful characters and actual storylines. Alas, The Stewardesses offer us none of that. Instead, we are handed a loose, rambling collection of gimmicky scenes that mean nothing and go nowhere. Were it not for the odd pool cue stabbing you directly in the eyeball, the film would be virtually unwatchable.
As stated, there is no story, just a series of mostly unrelated events. If there is a main character, it is Samantha (Christina Hart, The Roomates), a young, impressionable stewardess who desperately wants to become an actress. She meets a swaggering ad exec who promises to put her in pictures but, shockingly, does not deliver. She responds by smashing his skull in with a statue, then jumping out the window and splattering on the pavement. That might seem spoiler-y, but the odds are, you wouldn't have gotten to the end of the movie on your own anyway. I should also point out that this is supposed to be a comedy, yet it ends in a surprise suicide. Not a funny surprise suicide, either.
Hart's bits were added in later, to pad the running time and give the film some dramatic weight. Most of the movie is even less engaging. There is one note-worthy scene where one of the stews takes a hit of acid and has sex with a lamp. If they didn't drag it out for ten minutes, it might have been a classic bit of sexploitation weirdness.
There's also an incredibly awkward improvisational lesbian seduction scene that goes on forever and just gets more and more absurd as it rolls on. "Pretend you're in the ocean, and I'm the water." Yeesh.
Of course, the whole reason this film exists is to show off a bunch of pokey 3D effects, and although the experience is pretty patchy on DVD, The Stewardesses does deliver on a few cheap thrills in that department, particularly during the trip to the amusement park, when the camera vrooms around in a haunted house with scary old ladies poking you in the face with their crutches and disembodied skulls floating eerily around your living room. That was cool, as was the doggie-style porking/ensuing leisure suit fist-fight that follows soon after. Oh, and there's a party scene with a pretty swank teenage psyche band called the Re-Establishment and dozens of stewardesses, all in different uniforms. It is unclear whether they are wearing their work-clothes because they're all going to clock in after getting tanked all night, or they just love wearing polyester minidresses. At any rate, it looks just like a scene out of The Warriors. Only with more bare knees.
As stated, it ends badly, but then it begins pretty badly as well, so who's counting?
Availability: The Stewardesses is available onDVD in a deluxe 2 disc 40th Anniversary Edition from Shout! Factory, which includes two 3D versions of the movie (color and black & white), a 2D version, and a bonus disc with several featurettes, including a short history of 3D, complete with early examples, an explanation of the 3D processes used in the Stewardesses (snore) and a 20 minute collection of interviews from the crew and cast. One of the wiseguys on the crew claims that the lesbian scene is a 'comedy classic', but a still-cute Christina Hart is more honest about this whole tawdry affair. "The movie is appallingly bad," she says, point blank. And she is not lying.
All I can say is, thank god for T&A.
Oh, and there's two sets of 3D glasses with the DVD, as well. Good luck on finding a willing sucker to sit through it with you.
And so, out of seemingly nowhere, this mouthful of a movie. FGMTCC (I can't keep spelling it out, we'll be here all night) is not what you'd call a well-loved film, and I can see why people might find it a tad overbearing. It does, after all, lean quite heavily on scatological humor. The first five minutes of the film, for example, which features Flesh on the set of his very own biopic, is stuffed to the gills with fart, shit, and snot jokes. No one beyond the age of, say, 12 or 13 really equates sex with excrement, so this obsessive toilet humor gets tiresome very quickly, especially when you're in this for the boners, but ladies and gentlemen, I implore you: stick with it. Yes, it's hopelessly juvenile, but the sets and the special effects are consistently jaw-dropping, and there's a veritable feast of melon-sized mams to ogle, as well. And anyway, what else you got to do?
The story. Well, as mentioned, Flesh (Kickboxing champ Vince Murdocco) is being honored for all his interstellar heroism with a back-patting auto-biographical film, but after refusing to kiss his co-star/girlfriend Dale Ardor (Robyn Kelly) because "She's got something in her nose", the director fires him. He storms out of the studio and gets run over by an old-timey car, and before he can recover, he's nabbed by three chicks in mini-skirted space-suits. They pour out the back of an ambulance, tie a weird contraption to his head and whisk him off in a penis-shaped rocket ship to god-knows-where while Dale looks on, mouthing, "Why, why, why?"
Good question. To find her answer, she visits Dr Flexi Jerkoff, Titty Scientist (Tony Travis, Recruits), who has a booby-shaped doorbell. Listen, I told you it was juvenile. Dale explains what happened. The doctor surmises that the space girls have taken Flesh to the Strange Planet (that's the actual name of the planet) for some nefarious reason, and since some mafia guy is trying to kill him for deflating a gangster moll's overstuffed balloons (whatever), he agrees to take Dale to Flesh in the ramshackle spaceship he's got in his backyard. The spaceship may or may not run on chicken semen. There's a chicken coop in it, at any rate. Also, Dale and the doctor have to suck on rubber tits to "absorb the shock of lift-off". So that's going on.
Also, there's a report on the radio that 'King Dong' escaped from the set of the Flesh Gordon movie, and they pass by him as he's pissing off the roof of the Empire State Building. He, of course, splashes them with his giant ape urine, and then mugs for the camera.
Meanwhile, on Strange Planet, Flesh finds out why he's been abducted. Seems a mysterious figure named the Evil Presence showed up during an intergalactic Codball game (it's like baseball, I guess, only with dudes using their giant dicks to hit the balls), and shot the Strange Planet team with an impotence ray. Now they can't get it up, not even for the Cosmic Cheerleaders. Obviously, a planet without boners cannot stand.
Flesh's potency is known throughout the galaxy, so head cheerleader (cough) Robunda Hooters (Playboy playmate Morgan Fox) ordered his kidnapping, figuring he'd bang her and whoever else needed it. This is all explained via a topless musical number, by the way.
Ok, here's the last bit of plot. Plot might be overstating it. Anyway, on some other planet, one covered in ice (or, more accurately, an overworked smoke machine), the Evil Presence (William Dennis Hurt), the portly Queen Frigid (Maureen Webb), and a frizzy-haired mad scientist, Master Bator (Bruce Scott), sit around plotting sinister deeds. Bator finds out Flesh is on the Strange Planet, and tells EP that if they capture him, he can suck out Flesh's virility somehow and use it to make a more powerful impotence ray, once so awesome in strength that it will render the entire universe, except for these two numbskulls, impotent. Evil Presence, naturally, thinks this is a good idea.
Everybody ends up together on Strange Planet. When Dale gets there, Flesh is giving three of the cheerleaders head. Simultaneously. I should mention the three cheerleaders while we're here: there's Babs (Stevie-Lyn Ray), Candy Love (Sharon Rowley) and Sushi (Blaire Kashino). One's blonde, one's black, one's Asian. They're all wearing ugly, garish make-up and dayglo punk cheerleaders outfits, and they look exactly like one of Max Hardcore's pornstars/victims. I am not exactly sure why Mr. Ziehm chose to make the three girls who are naked most in the movie look repulsive. Perhaps it's a statement of some kind. I'll have to ask him. Robunda's kinda hot though, in a streetwalker/Pia Zadora sort of way.
Anyway, Dale's pissed, so she decides to break Robunda's face, but she's suddenly turned into a block of ice and sucked up into the Evil Presence's ship. Dunno why. Flesh and the titty scientist take chase, but first Flesh has to fuck a chicken. The chicken smokes a cigarette afterwards.
While Dale is thawed and tortured by Master Bator, Flesh and the doc have a bunch of wacky adventures, including an epic battle with a claymation penis and a trip to a bar inside a giant vagina where grown babies drink milk right from the, um, source (former Russ Meyer paramourMelissa Mounds offers her overflowing taps to Flexi). Flesh runs into Robunda there, and I was too distracted by how icky the whole scene was to catch why, but at one point she said: "I don't wear panties, but I will, if you agree to help." He agrees.
Back on Mr. Evil's ship, Dale, now dressed in a tutu, gets turned into a dog. She still looks like Dale, just now she crawls around on all fours and pants. She calls Evil P a "Nazi republican", so she's a talking dog. Flesh runs into some turd people in a dark cave, and they have a party.
Then Dale gets tongue-raped by an octopus. The whole film starts to resemble a sleep deprivation experiment at this point. We should just fast forward a bit.
Evil loses and everybody gets their boners back. They use them to fuck the partners of their choice, and life goes merrily on.
Incredibly,Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders only clocks in at 100 minutes. There's clearly enough ridiculous set-pieces and loony ideas for a three-hour epic, and I am positive Ziehm has an ass-numbing director's cut in a vault somewhere. The sticking point with this movie is that it's too gross to be sexy and too breast-obsessed to fit in any cult sci-fi sorta niche. The original had the advantage of 70's grooviness, but the sequel looks a lot like any new-wave inspired porn flick from the mid 80's, like, well New Wave Hookers, for example, only with all sorts of troubling animated creatures tossed in the mix. Ultimately, the film is still too far ahead of its time; we're still too uptight a society to appreciate softcore humping and grotesque shit-people in the same movie. Ziehm has created a masterpiece, surely, but it will not be regarded as such until some time in the future. 2069, let's say. Until then, expect a night of high weirdness, a queasy joyride into a garbage-psychedelic world of fat tits, slimy octo-rapists, ugly cheerleaders, robo Fu Manhus, and chicken fuckers from outer space.
Good Lord, what next? Notably, most of the cast were one-timers, folks who dabbled in acting for one hair-raising film and then vanished. As such, it is anybody's guess where the lovely Morgan Fox is today, or the not-so lovely cheerleaders, or Master Bator, or even Dale. Flesh/Vince is still around, doing small-ish bits on TV and b-flicks. Howard Ziehm has, so far, not made another film. He showed up as a talking head on a Brit-produced 2002 porn-doc, The History of Hardcore, so he's not dead. He's just waiting. Waiting for us to really 'get' his genius before he hits us with Part 3.
I'm working on it, sir.
By the way, I find it pretty depressing that we're living in a world without frequent visits from Melissa Mounds. So please come back soon. I don't even care if you're 60. You don't have to whip 'em out. Just come by and hang for awhile.
Shot in nine days (on weekends, over the course of a year and half, but still) for a budget of $40,000, The Stewardesses went on to gross over $6 million dollars in it's initial theatrical run, a monumental feat for any film in the late 1960's, never mind a grubby, X-rated 3D softcore flick. Once the buzz had set in for this one, people lined around blocks, snarling traffic for miles, just to see it. This would give you the impression that it was worth seeing. That's the bitch about buying a movie ticket, though. They won't give you your money back, just because the film is terrible. I am quite sure that the exit was just as busy as the entrance when The Stewardesses came to town in 1970.
As stated, there is no story, just a series of mostly unrelated events. If there is a main character, it is Samantha (Christina Hart, The Roomates), a young, impressionable stewardess who desperately wants to become an actress. She meets a swaggering ad exec who promises to put her in pictures but, shockingly, does not deliver. She responds by smashing his skull in with a statue, then jumping out the window and splattering on the pavement. That might seem spoiler-y, but the odds are, you wouldn't have gotten to the end of the movie on your own anyway. I should also point out that this is supposed to be a comedy, yet it ends in a surprise suicide. Not a funny surprise suicide, either.
Hart's bits were added in later, to pad the running time and give the film some dramatic weight. Most of the movie is even less engaging. There is one note-worthy scene where one of the stews takes a hit of acid and has sex with a lamp. If they didn't drag it out for ten minutes, it might have been a classic bit of sexploitation weirdness.
There's also an incredibly awkward improvisational lesbian seduction scene that goes on forever and just gets more and more absurd as it rolls on. "Pretend you're in the ocean, and I'm the water." Yeesh.
Of course, the whole reason this film exists is to show off a bunch of pokey 3D effects, and although the experience is pretty patchy on DVD, The Stewardesses does deliver on a few cheap thrills in that department, particularly during the trip to the amusement park, when the camera vrooms around in a haunted house with scary old ladies poking you in the face with their crutches and disembodied skulls floating eerily around your living room. That was cool, as was the doggie-style porking/ensuing leisure suit fist-fight that follows soon after. Oh, and there's a party scene with a pretty swank teenage psyche band called the Re-Establishment and dozens of stewardesses, all in different uniforms. It is unclear whether they are wearing their work-clothes because they're all going to clock in after getting tanked all night, or they just love wearing polyester minidresses. At any rate, it looks just like a scene out of The Warriors. Only with more bare knees.
As stated, it ends badly, but then it begins pretty badly as well, so who's counting?
(In April, 2009).