Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex | | Cast : | Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, Gene Wilder | | Director : | Woody Allen | | Studio : | Mgm/Ua Studios | | Format : | Color, Widescreen | | Released Date : | August 06, 1972 | | DVD Released Date : | September 07, 2004 | | Language : | Unknown (Dubbed), English (Dubbed), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Dubbed) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 09, 2005 | | Summary | Worth Seeing, But Not Allen's Best | Content
 | I rented this movie and reference it a lot. Mostly just the beginning part where Allen makes awful jokes like, "Have you heard about the King's new exercise program? It's called taxing the peasants." So the movie starts out pretty good.
Still, the movie isn't jam packed with laughs like Bananas is. It moves a little bit slower than some of Allen's other funny films. It takes its time. Every now and then a big laugh happens, but the laughs are a bit spaced out sometimes.
Gene Wilder is in this movie. I like Gene Wilder. I think in this movie he delivers two big laughs.
John Carradine is in this movie too. Very interesting to see this guy set up opportunities for Woody Allen to deliver punchlines and wisecracks. Even after Carradine mentions the most twisted sexual experiments ever that he's been conducting, all Allen can say is, "I hear you're famous for your potato pancakes." |
| Rating | | | Date | May 25, 2005 | | Summary | They Don't Make Them Like They Used To | Content
| Woody Allen's 1972 collection of short films under one roof covering various taboos related to sex such as infidelity, bestiality, perversity, S&M, etc. Although most of the stories are so so, the best two are with Gene Wilder and Rosy the sheep and the last one covering the complexities of human physiology prior to sex co-starring Tony Randall and Burt Reynolds. This is definitely one of Woody Allen's funniest films filled with all the low-brow humor that made him famous. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 06, 2005 | | Summary | Very, Very funny. Not as durable as most Allen flics. | Content
| `Everything you always wanted to know about sex* (*But were afraid to ask)', written and directed by Woody Allen is Allen's third `triple credit' movie after `Take the Money and Run' and `Bananas', and his first with a large, `Big Name' cast. But unlike later movies such as `Interiors', `Hannah and her Sisters', and `Crimes and `Misdemeanors', this cast is probably less likely to have been assembled for the honor of working with Allen than for the very typical Hollywood casting strategy of filling a large number of roles which appear on the screen for a short time with recognizable faces, so you instantly know that Lou Jacobi, for example, is playing a very bourgeois, very middle class Jewish burgher who, we quickly discover, has a yen to dress up as a woman. We make the similar connection with Tito Vandis as a middle eastern shepherd, John Carradine as a mad Dr. Frankenstein-like scientist, Gene Wilder as a quirky and up-tight doctor and Tony Randall as a prim and very button down control room supervisor.
Allen's stock character is so well known by this time that among the four characters he plays, at least one is totally against type, where he has a part in a `La Dolce Vita' parody, in Italian with subtitles and all, as a character very similar to that of Marcello Mastroianni, in situations stolen directly from Fellini's junk drawer.
Here, Allen comes closer to Mel Brooks' style than in any other of his movies, going so far as to share Gene Wilder (a frequent Mel Brooks star) and a Mel Brooks parody subject (Frankenstein). Like Brooks, there are many patently improbable or impossible situations cooked up merely for the laughs. Later in their careers, Brooks and Allen diverge primarily with Allen's concentrating on literally deathly serious subjects with jokes while Allen stays with plots and situations which are light and humorous through and through.
Since both parody and visual humor are Allen strong points, he has a field day with not one but six different situations where the objects of parody are:
Aphrodisiacs and Fools in Medieval Castle
Sheep and Sodomy
Cross Dressing
TV Game Shows, Homosexuality, and Bondage
Monster Movies
Science Fiction / Antacid Commercials
While I think this movie does not hold up as well as almost all of this other early movies, it's great fun to see personalities and actors such as Regis Philbin (as himself), Robert Walden, and Anthony Quayle. Lynn Redgrave and Burt Reynolds in small roles. The parodies may not work that well with audiences under 30 who have no memory of TV shows such as `What's My Line' or of Italian movies from Fellini or Antonioni.
What is amazing is how totally unerotic the whole movie is. For the life of me, I don't see how it deserved an R rating except that young viewers may simply not see past the very unexplicit scenes involving sexual subjects to the total absurdity of the situations. This rating is probably a demonstration of the fact that the mere mention of sodomy/bestiality, homosexuality, bondage, and infidelity are seen as more dangerous to discuss than explicit sex. The bottom line is that while there is virtually nothing in the movie that is erotic to an adult, there is much which may be dangerous for an unprepared subteen to see.
The hard part of evaluating the movie in the long run is how well Allen's typically clever humor outweighs the thin and cheaply filmed parodies, where there is no attempt at all to hide the tongue in cheek (see Mel Brooks) attitude of the movie. In the end, this film is probably better (funnier) than `Love and Death' but not quite as totally inventive or funny as `Take the Money and Run'.
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| Rating | | | Date | February 10, 2005 | | Summary | This is one funny movie. | Content
| To tell you the truth, I didn't rent this movie to learn everything unasked about that three-letter-word. But I thought that it was outrageous. Outrageously good. And I have to say that if you want real proof that Woody Allen's movies are great, then you have to start out with this movie. This is as crazy as a Woody Allen movie--or possibly any sex comedy--gets. |
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