Counting my young lad years at the drive-in when all you had to be was 16 to buy a ticket, I’ve been watching porn movies for close to 50 years. Like women, every once in a Blue Moon, along comes one that stops you cold.

My favorite skin movie to this day will always be Knockers Up, a very sexy “nudie” gem from the Early Sixties, though my guess is it’s probably buried along with the Ark of the Covenant somewhere in the anonymous sands of Ethiopia and unavailable for viewing. Which is okay because I wouldn’t want my wonderful memories of it tarnished by a re-visit that could alter the way I feel about it.

Old school hardcore was okay, and modern porn, give or take a few from the fertile mind of John Stagliano, never really did it for me. Way too predictable, boring, or the composition and rhythm was all wrong when it came to enjoying a sex scene. Porn, more than anything else, tends to suffer from omission rather than sins of commission. But I would have to say director Will Ryder is changing the dynamic of how we look at these things in the modern era.

With that argument on the table, I present Flight Attendants as Exhibit A. To borrow a bit of porn reviewer sarcasm, Flight Attendants may not be the Citizen Kane of porn [and to be compared to “Kane”,” a vanity project, isn’t exactly the compliment you would think], but it’s certainly the Airplane of XXX. Which to me is a pretty good compliment considering that Flight Attendants isn’t made on a Hollywood budget but certainly looks like it is.

It’s intelligently witty, extremely clever, pretty authentic [the control tower to cockpit lingo could be all mumbo jumbo for all I know but sounds about right] and the casting reflects a pretty shrewd eye for pulchritude.

So what you have here essentially is a pond stocked with the kind of a women that would get a Tiger Woods even in more trouble than he’s already in. Among the dozen or more porn pretties in the cast, Kayden Kross and Shyla Stylez are delirious standouts, and you just want to stare at them like some pervert with a box of Kleenex, a jar of Vaseline and a copy of Inflight magazine at the ready.

So it comes as no surprise, then, that the scenes featuring Ms. Kross and Stylez make you feel as though you’ve just gone first class after a surprise upgrade from coach. Which, in essence, is the plot of Flight Attendants.

Global Air, the line that Stylez and her buddies [including a very fey James Bartholet] work for, features luxurious empty seats and a main aisle uncluttered enough to accommodate an impromptu game of touch football. In other words it’s about to go under.

[A wiseass might argue that if you filled the seats with Stylez’s alleged lovers from a political scandal in Orange County a few years ago, things would turn around over night.] Then you have Sunny Lane and Eva Angelina doing marvelous jobs as attendants for a competing airline who take every available opportunity to rub it in with snarky comments and bitchy attitudes.

Why Global is toast is the fact that it took a negative news hit after an unfortunate crash in the Florida Everglades wiped out everyone on board except the former Miss Teen America and goody two-shoes, Kross. And it almost happens again when the plane Evan Stone’s piloting goes into violent nose dive as co-pilot Randy Spears has Stylez’s screen-filling ass bent over the control panel. What a scene this is.

Only in a movie like this can you milk tragedy for yuks, and Ryder does it with an evil bit featuring Kross swathed mummy-like in bandages after 11 plastic surgeries. So it’s decided by management that it would be a solid P.R. coup to hire Kross, once she heals, as an attendant and resurrect Global. Highly cynical and manipulative but it also makes a lot of sense.

When Kross is hired along with a ghetto mom, Misty Stone, is when you start blowing snot. Because it’s funny as fuck especially with Stone yelling to her off camera kids Jermaine and LaToya who are about to set the apartment on fire. Again cynicism knows no taste or boundaries to the hiring of Stone, all because she’s just gotten a lot of press having been invited to the White House as a descendant of one of Thomas Jefferson’s love children. Or something like that.

You could talk all day about the different characters. Hillary Scott, who takes it in the ass [surprise, surprise] from the pool boy, makes the move from brassy blond to a sandy color more lush and becoming to her, and it does wonders. Teagan Presley is also looking pretty good, and Thomas Ward, the Cosby lookalike comic, generates maybe the most laughs as one of the control tower operators who does Coz imitations that has incoming flights completely baffled.

Evan Stone, as he pretty much always is, is a riot, and as the resident Lothario, he craves Kayden in the sack which is to be expected.

“Isn’t it true you’re a womanizer and fucked your way through the entire flight attendant roster?” she asks him.

“Would you look at it… as a bad thing?” He wants to know with some hesitation.

Which is okay with her as long as there’s only cheap sex involved and not a serious relationship since this goody two-shoes things hasn’t been working. Then when Stone begins eating Kayden’s ass and fucking her face down in the mattress prison style, you thank the dictionary that there’s a word for “compromise”.

So now with all this, I’m wondering if Will Ryder’s setting a standard with Flight Attendants that even he can’t surpass. Like a Woodstock-type one of a kind happening, everything here just falls in place: great cast, very funny lines [only a true cinephile will recognize the plot’s punch line as coming from the Jack Lemmon flick The Out of Towners] and sexy scenes- and by that I mean you get to see all the stuff you want to see and don’t feel slighted in the least.

Basically, Flight Attendants has all you could ever possibly want from a porn movie, but, frankly, I’d still like to see Knockers Up one more time.