As fans of the D-Generation’s Late Show will know all too well, there’s a lot of comic mileage to be gained from taking a crappy old movie or television show and re-dubbing it with new voices, turning what was once deadpan-serious into something that’s often hilarious both vocally and visually. The D-Gen, of course, were not the first to make use of this concept - it’s been done many times before, most famously by US TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. Locally, a team of comics called Double Take got quite a bit of attention for their live re-voicings of seriously crappy old movies, then felt encouraged enough to try the same thing in 1993 as a theatrically-released feature with David Parker (of The Big Steal and Malcolm fame) “directing�, using the vision from a dodgy 1964 Spanish movie called Samson And The Mighty Challenge. It was occasionally funny. The problem with this particularly specialised kind of comedy, though, is that if it’s not funny most of the time (like the D-Gen’s Bargearse was) the audience is left with… well, a crappy movie.

It all seems so very post-modern, this re-voicing of old crappy features. But way back in 1966, a man named Woody Allen was just starting what would turn out to be a long career in comedic (and later serious) cinema, and decided that an obscure 1964 Japanese action film called Kagi No Kagi (Key Of Keys) that was trying desperately to be a suave and sophisticated James Bond-style adventure (’64, we gather, must have been a banner year for crappy foreign movies) would make a good target for a new soundtrack and some rapid-fire comedy. Allen assembled a few comedic friends and set about creating a new story, mercilessly re-editing the original and building a new plot based on the silliest things imaginable. The result was What’s Up, Tiger Lily? - one of Allen’s least-seen movies, and his first, technically speaking, as a director.

The plot? Ah, who cares? The plot’s not important, but suffice to say it involves the frantic search for a recipe for egg salad. Not just any egg salad, mind. No, our Japanese hero with the unlikely name of Phil Moscowitz is looking for The Great Recipe - one that will create “a salad so delicious you could plotz�! Along the way he runs into the likes of Teri Yaki and her sister Suki, and ‘60s band The Lovin’ Spoonful turn up on occasion for no particular reason other than the fact that they’re undoubtedly groovy. Man. Allen himself appears a few times in cut-away segments, including a deadpanned (but hilarious) introduction at the start of the movie.

A lot of what transpires is very, very funny - but like many of Allen’s classic comedies, there are a lot of misfired jokes as well. Just what works and what doesn’t will ultimately depend on just how in tune you are with the Woody sense of humour, but regardless, it’s great fun. Note, by the way, that one of the funniest moments here - the hair-in-the-camera-gate sequence - was mirrored some 20 years later by Joe Dante for his cinema version of Gremlins 2. Which just goes to prove that you can be utterly silly and subtly influential at the same time.

Considering the relative obscurity of the movie and the near-total obscurity of the source material it makes use of, this DVD of the film is surprisingly easy on the eyes. Presented at a 2.35:1 aspect ratio (in “Tohoscope�, no less!), the film transfer looks surprisingly clean and crisp for a 35 year-old production, with the general absence of scratches, nicks and other decaying-film problems a pleasant surprise - someone obviously went into the vaults and found either the negative or an unused print of this one. The fact that the transfer isn’t 16:9 enhanced may seem puzzling, but even more so is the fact that the running time on this PAL disc is tellingly exactly the same as that of the original theatrical release (at 80 minutes, by the way, this isn’t a movie that’ll take too big a slice of your night). We’re willing to bet that this unexpectedly theatre-exact running time, combined with the very obvious presence of frame judder on what should be smooth camera pans and the lack of 16:9 enhancement, means that this transfer was most likely converted to PAL from an NTSC master done for laserdisc (though we weren’t able to find any definitive confirmation of the film having ever been issued on laserdisc in the US).

For a movie of this vintage, colour saturation and detail is very good; however, a bit too much edge enhancement has been applied during the transfer, something that’s very obvious on occasion. Aside from some moire patterning on Woody’s jacket during the opening introduction, video artefacts aren’t a problem - and like almost everything done by Madman Interactive, the authoring is flawless (and as usual, a jacket picture and DVD text are encoded on the disc). The menus (the main menu is fully animated) are extremely well designed and completely in keeping with the spirit of the film.

Audio, while encoded as a Dolby Digital 2.0 stream, is good ol’ fashioned mono, just as you’d expect. Some work has obviously been done to clean this soundtrack up, and the result is free of excessive hiss or other noise. Quality-wise, though, it’s a rather compressed and harsh soundtrack, sounding (with its tell-tale lack of top and bottom frequencies and distortion) like it came from an optical source - which it most probably did.

Extras are limited; there’s 16 images of the “Tiger Lily Kittens� (like, y’know, Bond Girls) and a mini-article on how the Kittens that played Teri and Suki Yaki ended up as Bond Girls (coincidence? naaah!) in You Only Live Twice. There’s also a full-screen plug for the soundtrack album (but no actual music, unfortunately) and a 20-page text bio of Woody - which, while credited as having been supplied by the Internet Movie Database, turns out to be mostly a shortened version of the Allen entry in Leonard Maltin’s 1994 Movie Encyclopaedia, which the IMDB licences for use on their site. Oops.

Finally, there’s also a full-frame trailer that’s in dreadful shape, and which was obviously produced for a VHS re-release in the US - this isn’t the original theatrical trailer, if indeed there ever was one.