Having long been a fan of DRACULA SUCKS, a film that, scattershot as it is, I still find one of the most entertaining artifacts of the '70s porno boom, I was excited to check out the same team's obscure 1978 co-feature, LUST FLIGHT 2000. As it turns out, this is a clunker that's lost for a reason - it's god-awful!
The film has less a plot than a basic set-up, with a group of recently-deceased Texans boarding a cosmic plane to the afterlife (if this was a parody of some then-contemporary pop culture, it eluded me completely). While the pilot sits in the cockpit getting head, the passengers get busy in the cabin. Eventually realizing this setup is going nowhere, the film has the plane land and the passengers continue screwing in the hangar, with some nonsense about having to impress the crew to ensure their passage through the Pearly Gates. Rick Lutze is one of the stewards, Mike Ranger a country-western Lothario, and Bill Margold provides his usual obnoxious mugging and limpid cocksmanship, his sub-Bobby Astyr theatrics the final nail in the coffin of this dead-on-arrival clunker. The only worthwhile part is the end, where the entire cast descends naked from the airplane with little angel wings strapped to their backs. It's a beautiful moment of dimestore surrealism the film promptly runs into the ground by dragging out to such length it reaches the point of parody.
Father-son creative team Phillip and Darryl Marshak demonstrated tremendous potential in their sophomore effort, but this freshman outing suggests it was a fluke. Incredibly, they reworked it in the early '80s, adding shot-on-video scenes from the Serena and Jamie Gillis vehicle EDUCATING SERENA and releasing it with new narration as NIGHT FLIGHT. This makes a certain sense when you consider the equally-choppy DRACULA (also released in at least three versions) and the elder Marshak's involvement in the cut-and-paste hodgepodge NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR. Apparently remixing was a passion of his, but no matter how you slice it, LUST FLIGHT deserves to remain grounded.
The film has less a plot than a basic set-up, with a group of recently-deceased Texans boarding a cosmic plane to the afterlife (if this was a parody of some then-contemporary pop culture, it eluded me completely). While the pilot sits in the cockpit getting head, the passengers get busy in the cabin. Eventually realizing this setup is going nowhere, the film has the plane land and the passengers continue screwing in the hangar, with some nonsense about having to impress the crew to ensure their passage through the Pearly Gates. Rick Lutze is one of the stewards, Mike Ranger a country-western Lothario, and Bill Margold provides his usual obnoxious mugging and limpid cocksmanship, his sub-Bobby Astyr theatrics the final nail in the coffin of this dead-on-arrival clunker. The only worthwhile part is the end, where the entire cast descends naked from the airplane with little angel wings strapped to their backs. It's a beautiful moment of dimestore surrealism the film promptly runs into the ground by dragging out to such length it reaches the point of parody.
Father-son creative team Phillip and Darryl Marshak demonstrated tremendous potential in their sophomore effort, but this freshman outing suggests it was a fluke. Incredibly, they reworked it in the early '80s, adding shot-on-video scenes from the Serena and Jamie Gillis vehicle EDUCATING SERENA and releasing it with new narration as NIGHT FLIGHT. This makes a certain sense when you consider the equally-choppy DRACULA (also released in at least three versions) and the elder Marshak's involvement in the cut-and-paste hodgepodge NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR. Apparently remixing was a passion of his, but no matter how you slice it, LUST FLIGHT deserves to remain grounded.