What's Up, Tiger Lily?

1966

Adventure / Comedy / Crime / Thriller

Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 81% · 26 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 52% · 5K ratings
IMDb Rating 5.8/10 10 10353 10.4K

spy spoof

Director

Top cast

Tetsu Nakamura Photo
Tetsu Nakamura as Foreign Minister
Tadao Nakamaru Photo
Tadao Nakamaru as Shepherd Wong
Kumi Mizuno Photo
Kumi Mizuno as Phil's Date
Mie Hama Photo
Mie Hama as Teri Yaki

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by juliankennedy23 7 / 10

I'll have my mustache eat your beard.

What’s up Tiger Lily: 7 out of 10: Long before Airplane or Mystery Science Theater 3000 or even my own mix-up of an uncut bootleg of Chōjin densetsu Urotsukidōji and Led Zeppelin II (Blows Pink Floyd and the Wizard of OZ out of the water.) there was What’s Up Tiger Lily.A very young Woody Allen acquired the rights of a Japanese James Bond knockoff called Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi (Literal English title International Secret Police: Key of Keys) and dubbed in his own dialogue.The film starts with some non-dubbed footage involving bondage, a shootout, and a circular saw. Then Woody appears with an interviewer what he has done with the film. The film then restarts Woody’s dubbing in place and with the exception of two short interruptions by Woody (both very funny) It is the Japanese import with a new script and story.The dub itself is quite funny and well done. One can definitely see the roots of some of Woody Allen’s comic themes in this work. The overall story of the world’s greatest egg salad recipe is quite well done and the voice work is applicable and fits the on screen characters well.What’s Up Tiger Lily benefits from good source material to work with. Longtime fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 know that even the best riffing can suffer from deadly boring source material. (Red Zone Cuba for example). What’s Up Tiger Lily’s source material is colorful, action packed, and has a very attractive cast. In fact I would love to see the original source material.On the down side, since the film is dubbed, when the movie has no dialogue the experience can drag. Unlike an Airplane or a Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing session, What’s Up Tiger Lily isn’t a 10 jokes a minute affair. Even more detrimental the Lovin Spoonful show up periodically to present an unrelated music video. This both dates the effort horribly and kills the flow of the humor.What’s Up Tiger Lily is a must see for fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and of Woody Allen’s early comedy. (And fans of the Lovin Spoonful I guess).One should pay respect to ones elders and it is a very fun time.
Reviewed by thurberdrawing 6 / 10

The Spy Who Dubbed Me

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.
Reviewed by Platypuschow 6 / 10

What's Up, Tiger Lily?: Oddly hilarious

What's Up, Tiger Lily? was Woody Allen's directorial debut. Kind of.Bear with me on this one, the film is basically the Toho movie Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kayaku no taru (Key of Keys) from 1964 with a comedy dub over it. And by comedy dub I mean totally over the top silly stuff, yet somehow someway it works.I don't like Woody Allen, I find his movies boring and pretentious but this was an unexpected surprise and nothing like I've seen from him before (Probably because it's not technically one of his movies).It takes a lot to get me laughing out loud especially in hysterics but What's Up, Tiger Lily? managed it several times. Sure a lot of it is really silly and makes you wonder quite what in the blue hell you're watching but when it's funny it's very very funny.I found myself unleashing with a hearty belly laugh multiple times throughout the film and I honestly can't remember the last time a film managed that. Sure the really funny moments aren't exactly frequent but when they arrive you know about it.If you like low brow humor, like really really low brow humor you might get a kick out of this.The Good:Some real belly laughsA very novel ideaThe Bad:Stupid musical interludesSome stuff just too silly to be funnyThe "Hand" scene
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