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What's Up, Tiger Lily? More at IMDbPro »

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64 reviews in total

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32 out of 36 people found the following review useful:
Different version, 11 April 2005

Author: sockhop600 from United States

I have noticed several posts here about how people had seen this movie years ago and thought it was hysterical, but then have recently seen it on TV and wondered why they thought so back then. The answer is that you are probably watching a different version.

Although I am sure someone more in tune with the background of this movie can explain it in more precise and detailed terms, the version being shown on networks like TCM has been re-written, re-dubbed and is a lot less funny than the original. I have a copy from a 1982 video tape and that original version is great. I saw the TCM broadcast version and couldn't believe how badly the jokes were changed and how unfunny this film now is, most likely in the name of political correctness. I can certainly understand anyone being dissatisfied with the film as it is now. However, if you can, find an old video of this classic and watch it the way it was meant to be seen.

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21 out of 25 people found the following review useful:
Oh come on you bunch of sourpusses!, 20 March 2005

Author: ubercommando from London

It's not "Manhattan", it's not "Sleeper" and it's not "Small Time Crooks" but it's funny, it's wacky in that 60's way and it's not the bad stinker of a movie people here think it is. Watch it with a some friends or some beer (or both) and just enjoy it. Sour grapes because Woody did what a lot of film nerds want to do? And the whole "Saracen pigs! Saxon dogs! Roman cow!" when Phil Moskowitz karate chops villains is a precursor to Austin Powers' "judo chop". This movie is a one off, and a pretty good one off as well.

"Loooooooooooove has found meeeeeeeeeeeeee, and I have found the waaaaaaaaaaay!"

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23 out of 31 people found the following review useful:
The Spy Who Dubbed Me, 22 May 2005

Author: Fred (thurberdrawing@yahoo.com) from Long Island, USA

It's almost necessary to watch this with a friend or two. You'll need to make sure your friends are familiar with movie conventions of the mid-sixties. If they aren't, they might not laugh. If they are, you'll probably laugh at the same time and have fun. To be brief, WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY is a Japanese detective movie made in 1964 and dubbed into English two years later for comic effect. The perpetrators are Woody Allen, Louise Lasser and a few others. In an unusual move, Woody Allen sets up the joke at the beginning, explaining on camera that's he's removed the soundtrack to the original, rewritten the dialogue and made it a comedy. What makes WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY above-average, other than the fact that people don't just dub entire movies with gag-dialogue having nothing to do with the plot, is that it takes the humor which clearly already exists in the original and twists it. Although the original is foreign, it is very similar to any number of American or British detective movies of the time, such as OUR MAN FLINT or THE LADY IN CEMENT. Anybody who went to a double-feature in 1966 had sat through such a movie. The dubbed dialogue is not entirely removed from what is clearly the intent of the original dialogue. There are funny visuals in this movie. Woody Allen's dialogue spins on the visuals and makes fun of them up to a point, but it is, actually, a pretty good movie in the first place. It's not as if Allen took a bad movie and ridiculed it. The visuals are entertaining in themselves. Allen's plot involves a search for the world's greatest recipe for chicken soup. Every time the characters think they've found the recipe, we see them inspecting strips of microfilm. Obviously, the original involves a search for microfilm. So, the plot is obvious. Our maverick detective will track down the bad guys and win. Why not eliminate the original dialogue and treat us to a feature-film's worth of one-liners? If you like GET SMART, you'll probably like this movie. If you don't like GET SMART, you probably won't like it. But if you can't see why Allen bothered with this, you'll need to ask yourself why so many movies in the late sixties spoofed the spy genre. Woody Allen didn't operate in a vacuum here. A note on the recent altering of Woody Allen's dialogue: I have WHAT'S UP TIGER LILY on a DVD released by IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT. It contains both the soundtrack Woody Allen did for the 1966 release and what the packaging calls the "television audio" track. Very condsiderately, IMAGE provides an option for comparing the dialogue where Woody Allen's dialogue has been replaced by the dialogue of whomever has RE-RE-dubbed it for TV. I've compared some of them and am saddened to think that Allen's humor has been forcibly blunted for current broadcast. But IMAGE does let us hear the difference, and that's more than TV audiences may be getting. If you see this on TV and think the dialogue is strangely tepid, try the DVD. You'll be able to hear what Woody Allen intended. (I have to qualify this, though, because he seems to have had to put up with a certain amount of studio interference in 1966.) Finally, I'll say that you'll probably recognize a few of the actors in this movie. Two of the women appeared in a James Bond movie, and the main actor, Tatsuya Mihashi, who died only last year (in 2004) appeared in several prestigious films. Therefore, Woody Allen isn't trouncing on helpless fools here.

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13 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
What's up, tiger lily? Whoa-o-o-o-o-oh, 25 October 2005

Author: Lee Eisenberg (eisenberg.lee@gmail.com) from Portland, Oregon, USA

Ever seen a Japanese man with a Jewish name? Now you will! Making his directorial debut, Woody Allen takes a Japanese spy movie and re-dubs it into being a search for the world's best egg salad recipe. You read that right. This is, after all, from the man who brought us "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex...". The dialogue mostly sounds like the sort of comments that we would expect to hear on "MST3K", with a few exceptions. As for the Lovin' Spoonful, you'll just have to see what you think of their appearance in the movie. But overall, "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" is really funny. An interesting follow-up to "What's New, Pussycat?".

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10 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
this movie is very funny., 13 July 2005

Author: pvzm from United States

i have seen this movie several times. it is funny. it is amazing to watch the actor's gestures and facial expressions and realize that the story they are acting is not the one you are hearing. the original story must have been a little silly as well. a lot different from most other Woody Allen films, but still very funny. this movie has that wonderful sixties feeling to it. mystery science theater and the who's line is it any way guys must have gleaned some inspiration from this film. something of a James bond spoof. the guy who repeatedly bursts into song still makes me laugh just thinking about it. this is the kind of movie that will make you want to repeat the dialog in real life just to be a silly person.

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8 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Proto-MST3K, 19 October 1998
Author: Tug-3 from New York, NY

If you like *Mystery Science Theater 3000,* chances are you'll get a kick out of this mildly amusing Woody Allen farce. Although the concept is ingenious (22 years before the misadventures of the Satellite of Love), the jokes are not as funny as they could or should be, and there is far too much emphasis on Allen's sexual hang-ups. There are a lot of scenes that could have been hysterical, but which turn out to be uncomfortably unamusing. Still, for its campiness and originality, you should try to catch this film sometime.

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10 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
Tiger Lily Serves Up A Loving Spoonful of Some REALLY Good Egg Salad, 17 May 2005

Author: gftbiloxi (gftbiloxi@yahoo.com) from Biloxi, Mississippi

A woman steps into the room wearing a towel. She and her lover gaze longingly at each other. "Name three presidents!" she says.

In the wake of his early successes as a writer, Allen obtained the rights to an extra-cheesy Japanese spy thriller, threw out the entire soundtrack, then wrote and dubbed in a new script. Mix in a "what has this got to do with anything?" soundtrack by the folk-rock 60s group The Lovin' Spoonful and a few new scenes, and the result is the infamous WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY? And it is one of the most bizarre movies you're likely to see this lifetime, a film which has attained cult-movie status of the highest order.

The movie is uneven--but that is actually part of its charm. Where else can you see big-haired 60s mamas get down like psycho killers to the innocuous music of The Lovin' Spoonful? Or tacky special effects, inept hop-and-chop fighting, and ridiculously bad cinematography reworked into the story of a bunch of spies on the track of a recipe for the world's best egg salad? And some of the lines are a hoot and a half. My own favorite: "Bring plenty of dynamite. It's a big mother!" Hardcore Allen fans, who often approach him as if he were God, will probably be embarrassed by this movie. Allen himself is pretty embarrassed: he's been trying to live it down for years. But if you have a taste for the bizarre--not to mention some good, I mean REALLY good egg salad--TIGER LILY is the movie for you. Recommended to egg salad junkies, bad hop-and-chop movie watchers, and cult-film enthusiasts everywhere.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

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10 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
One of the few Woody Allen films that doesn't work for me, 14 January 2005

Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City

Woody Allen gives a Japanese-directed James Bond-styled actioner a new soundtrack, including different dialogue telling a new story. Allen's changes turn the film into a spy versus spy quest for the recipe of the world's best egg salad.

I'm a huge Woody Allen fan. The idea behind this film is promising and the basic premise of Allen's story, grafted on to a pre-existing film, International Secret Police: Key of Keys (Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi), from 1965, by Senkichi Taniguchi, is funny, if silly. However, this is one of the very few Allen films that just doesn't work for me. The Taniguchi film seems chopped up to a point of incoherence (maybe it's presented here in its entirety and in the same order, but that would mean that its running time is around 60 minutes or less), although that could be a factor of the changed dialogue. I found myself wishing there was an alternate soundtrack that was a legitimate dubbing of the original film.

Although there are a few very funny scenes, one-liners and ideas in Allen's new story, most of it isn't very funny. Too many scenes seem like they may be serious translations of the Japanese dialogue. There are too many occurrences of silly vocal noises, but not enough to make that a motif so that it's funny. There are too many long sections where the film is mostly boring. The untranslated beginning goes on far too long. The mini-interview with Allen that explains the film's premise would only be funny if it weren't true. The Lovin' Spoonful scenes aren't funny, and perhaps weren't intended to be--they seem like a studio attempt to try to put more butts in theater seats upon the film's release by featuring a popular rock group. It doesn't seem like Allen spent much time on this—the dialogue seems largely improvised and mostly disjointed. In short, the film is basically a mess, and only worth viewing for Woody Allen completist, and men with a serious Asian woman fetish (it's also worth noting that Taniguchi seems to share a foot fetish).

What would have worked better, and probably would have made the film much funnier, is if Allen would have written and directed both the film that we're seeing visually and a completely different story for the soundtrack. Much more time would have to be spent crafting each component to make them seem unrelated but coherent and funny. That's an experiment that remains to be done, to my knowledge.

There are enough positive aspects that the film doesn't deserve a 1--as I noted, there are times that What's Up, Tiger Lily is funny--but the best I can do is a 5 out of 10.

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2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
not for all tastes, but if you're in the right crazy-comedy mode it could be one of Woody's funniest films, 16 August 2006

Author: MisterWhiplash from United States

In its own nature, the film being made fun of within the film What's Up, Tiger Lily is inherently silly. It's a James Bond rip-off done to the Nth degree, where based on only a few films its Japanese B-movie counterpart does everything just in imagery alone to make it a ludicrous action-movie experience. Just in the opening moments, even before Woody Allen appears on the screen to explain the method to the madness in the film, is quite funny in a bad-movie sort of way. And I think that it's probably not too unexpected that it puts a divide in Woody Allen's audience. There's the group that's more into just his later style of wit and humor, and I can tell that for those it's not surprising to see some not really 'getting' into this style of wacky, off-the-wall, cartoon humor. But after seeing a couple of more dramatic films recently, this one really did the trick. It's the film that was the most likely to spawn the underground Night of the Living Dead parody of 1991, along with Kung Pow (the former being better than the latter), but it also has a kin-ship, if not ascendancy, of the ZAZ comedies of the late 70s and 80s, and even a tinge of Mel Brooks.

So, for me, this is actually one of my favorite Woody Allen comedies. Not really up as high in terms of cinematic 'quality' (in terms of craftsmanship, I mean) as his 70s films, but with material like this, it's almost required not to carp. Woody and his team of writers and voice actors almost have it cut out for them. There's much to wonder, perhaps, in what the 'real' plot of this Japanese spy film (Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi, or International Secret Police: Key of Keys) is almost as funny as what the writers come up with. Spies and assassins are on the look out for, get this, an Egg salad recipe! But, of course, this is just as much a gimmick as is, well, much of the rest of what comes out of the actor's mouths. At times I wasn't even sure if it was all Woody Jokes, or which were (twenty minutes, apparently, are not by Woody Allen's group but by someone else, though it's hard to tell which is a credit to most involved), but I didn't care. It's got the kind of jokes that, on a certain plain, can allow you to laugh like an idiot.

Certain gags just come with the territory of the film itself, and are heightened by the added bits during fights. But much of the film is based on the wit Woody's known for, though here sometimes to equally 'bad-pun' and juvenile terms, even featuring (practically never in any of his other films) rock and roll and cartoon-like voices (my favorite the snake-obsessed henchman) right out of Looney Tunes and Ren & Stimpy. So many lines strike up laughs to greater or lesser degrees it's hard to really spot them out, but it's suffice to say that by the time it's done- and through its end credits featuring an eye-exam- you'll know whether you'll want to watch it again like a ZAZ or Brooksfilm to memorize the quotable lines and bits, or put it in the lower, deeper-to-find section in your video collection. Things like a spy who bursts into an operatic love song during tense confrontation scenes, and with puns like "two Wong's don't make a right", are what you can expect in this film, but there's more, and it will either ignite the anything-goes funny button, or just not do it for you. One thing's for sure, you'll never see the Lovin' Spoonful the same way again.

By the way, this review reflects the Woody Allen dub of the movie (of what's 2/3 there anyway), and it's available on the DVD; recommended over the other dub that's been floating around too.

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4 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
"Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.", 11 February 2007

Author: Merwyn Grote (majikstl@aol.com) from St. Louis, Missouri

Back during the Colorization Wars of the 1980s, Woody Allen was uncharacteristically public about defending the history and artistry of his craft against those who were eager to take old black & white classics and turn them into digitized coloring books. Chief among the foes of the cinematic art were Ted Turner, who had used his power as a media mogul to buy up control of a huge backlog of films by MGM, RKO, Warner Bros. and other studios as fodder for his cable TV channels. Whether as philistine or shrewd capitalist, Turner hoped to prolong the money-making life of old movies by making them look vaguely newer through color. Of this, Woody said, "To change someone's work without any regard to his wishes shows a total contempt for film, for the director and for the public." To which Ted replied "WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY?" It was not a question.

And unfortunately, Ted had a point.

Once upon a time, WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY? was a 1965 Japanese spy movie called KOKUSAI HIMITSU KEISATSU: KAGI NO KAGI (a.k.a., INTERNATIONAL SECRET POLICE: KEY OF KEYS). The low rent U.S. studio, American International Pictures, bought the rights to the film and, apparently realizing they had a hibachi-cooked turkey on its hands, they decided to try to salvage the project by turning it into a comedy. Fresh from his experience as writer and actor in WHAT'S NEW, PUSSYCAT, Woody was offered the opportunity to try directing -- well, re-directing -- by re-writing, re-editing and re-dubbing KEY OF KEYS into TIGER LILY? And the film's James Bond-style story about missing microfilm became a wise-cracking farce about the search for the perfect egg salad recipe.

It may never be known if KEY OF KEYS was/is a good film, but it is apparent that for all of his efforts, Woody couldn't save it for American audiences. Rearranging the scenes and putting smart alec remarks and inane non sequiturs into the unsuspecting mouths of the actors must have been fun and maybe even an educational experience for the neophyte filmmaker. The result it like a 3-D MAD Magazine satire or a trial run for the type of comedy that would make its breakthrough with AIRPLANE! and THE NAKED GUN. But in the end, TIGER LILY isn't all that funny, or at least not consistently funny. For every good chuckle there are a dozen lead balloons and too much of the dialogue is used to explain the convoluted plot. If appearances are anything, the reconstruction of the film was a rush job and it all was done on the cheap.

So the interesting thing about TIGER LILY is not its value as art or entertainment, but the ethics behind it. You can't blame Woody for taking on the project; it must have been a challenge and it was certainly an opportunity to move his career into a new direction. But, as the Ted Turner situation would make apparent, TIGER LILY is not the film that the makers of KEY OF KEYS had envisioned. That is not to say that in its original Japanese form, the film was a CITIZEN KANE or a MALTESE FALCON or even a MANHATTAN, but whatever it was, Allen greatly altered the way it would be experienced by most of the world. Of course, Woody never claimed that his version of the film was meant to replace or even compete with the original, but just the same he negated another director's work.

If anything TIGER LILY is a lesson in both the plastic and the fragile nature of film as an art. Whether with mischief or malice, a little imagination can alter not just the tone of a film but its message and its vision. And as the BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN parodies that made their way to Youtube.com proved, you don't even have to be a professional to become a re-director.

A further irony: AIP found Woody's cut of the film too short for theatrical release and they again reedited it to add some more footage and a few faux music videos by The Loving Spoonful. You can even tell in the final cameo that he makes at the end of the film that Woody's own voice has been redubbed by someone else. This angered Allen, who felt his work had been violated, and it motivated his drive to become a director who protects his work from unwanted tampering. But one wonders if Senkichi Taniguchi, the director of KEY OF KEYS ever saw WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY? --and whether or not he ever forgave Woody for what he did to it.

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