What's Up, Tiger Lily?
Director: Woody Allen. Cast: Woody Allen, The Lovin' Spoonful, Tatsuya Mihashi, Tadao Nakamaru, Eisei
Amamoto, Steven Boone. Screenplay: Woody Allen, Julie Bennett, Frank Buxton, Louise Lasser, Len Maxwell,
Mickey Rose, and Bryan Wilson (adapted – very loosely! – from the screenplay Kagi No Kag by
Kazuo Yamada).
One of Woody Allen's first features was this deranged grand-daddy of Mystery Science Theater 3000,
which, rather than offer chortling side-comments to a terrible movie, actually shucked the whole
soundtrack of the existing Japanese action drama Kagi No Kag and looped in a whole new farcical
story line about smugglers, call girls, and egg salad. Trust me, I'm not kidding, but also trust me that
the project isn't nearly as funny as the premise and promise of Allen's name might suggest. I suspect
that this sort of stunt work, which plenty of comics could have pulled off just as easily, seems like a
disappointment when compared with the more personal, more focused, and more riotously funny work Allen
comes up with when he films his own pictures from scratch. Also disappointing is how much of the fake
dialogue (penned and, more often than not, improvised by Allen and a whole crew of co-conspirators) seems
to hew so closely with what must have been the original plot; Allen has the inspiration to turn a
valuable secret code into an egg salad recipe, but most of the other props and characters are described
in surprisingly and unimaginatively literal terms.
Maybe the biggest factor weighing against the film—and the one that made so many of the MST3K
features so laugh-filled—is that the original dialogue and scenarios of a film this clearly preposterous
are almost inevitably more funny than what even the sharpest tongues can substitute or contribute from
the sidelines. What's Up, Tiger Lily? does achieve one consistently riotous strain of comedy in
following a crazed bartender-henchman who owns a pet cobra and talks like Peter Lorre, but all in all, to
paraphrase an old Entertainment Weekly review, "You can skip entire chapters and not miss much;
you can skip the whole movie and not miss a thing." Grade: C–