Was Sie schon immer über Sex wissen wollten, aber bisher nicht zu fragen wagten

While all the early Woody Allen films are funny and worthwhile, this is probably the most uneven to my taste.

Allen took the famous, serious non-fiction book about sex, and turned it into a series of short comedy pieces. A couple segments are pure genius (inside the male body during sex, Gene Wilder falling in love with a sheep), a couple are pretty good (Woody as a medieval court jester trying to have an affair with the queen, who is locked into a chastity belt, a mad scientist creates a giant milk squirting breast that goes on a rampage) and a few are real duds.

Also, of all the Allen films, this might have the worst DVD print/transfer quality.

It's bizarre and disturbing is that a lot of Allen's brilliant early work seems to be going out of print. Hopefully this is just a temporary state of affairs, and better re-releases are ahead. But if you're a fan you might want to grab copies of this, Bananas, Sleeper, Take the Money and Run, etc now, while you can.

In a series of sketches Woody Allen looks at aphrodisiacs, bestiality, cross dressing, perversions, sexual experiments and the functioning of the body during intercourse. All this answers key questions about sex that perhaps we were all to afraid to ask.

Woody Allen apparently just noted down all his comedy thought about sex and decided to make them into a movie. The end result is a strange beast – like sex it has bits that are fantastic and bits that aren't quite as fun but you gotta do them to get to the good stuff! The questions that are asked in subtitle are never actually answered and several times are barely relateable to the actual sketches themselves – so don't expect to learn very much but get ready for some laughs – but not as many as you'd hope.

Allen's comedies are either surreal quick fire comedies or witty plot based things. This is one of the former, or at least wants to be. Some of the sketches are very imaginative and very funny – what's my perversion, the experiment and the innerspace look at sex are all funny. However some others are mildly amusing or totally pointless (the cross dressing one doesn't really work).

That said it is still quite funny despite the lapses. The cast are good – but I wanted to see Woody more as the weakest sketches were without him and needed his influence. Faces like Lynn Redgrave, Carradine, Tony Randall, Burt Reynolds, Barry etc are all good but only really serve to distract.

Overall fans will enjoy this example of his `earlier funnier work' but for others they may find that too many of the jokes don't hit as hard as you'd want and some just plain misfire. The hits only just outweigh the misses but it's still work a watch.

Representing something of an early high point in Woody Allen's career, this scattershot spoof of David Rueben's highly popular sex-manual has become somewhat sadly overlooked in favour of the more mature and whimsical charms of 'Annie Hall' and 'Manhattan', but 'Everything you always wanted to know about sex' is just as enjoyable as his later works, if not more so.

Although the overt intellectualism that many of Allen's detractors criticize in his subsequent work is already beginning to take form here, not only in the concept (seriously, who'd adapt a sex-manual?) but also in execution, which owes more to the high-brow Fellini and Godard than the low-brow Mel Brooks or John Waters, includes a great deal of metaphysical surrealism, bizarre camera angles and deliberately self-indulgent dialog. Here Allen's filmmaking approach is more self-serving than ever before, casting himself as a medieval stand-up comedian, a heroic leading man and a sperm, yet still finding time to feature in a lengthy satire on early-seventies European cinema. The reason it all comes together without succumbing to self-importance is down to the simplicity and stupidity of most of the set pieces.

The more interesting segments come at the beginning of the film, and if seeing Woody trying hopelessly to unlock Lynn Redgrave's chastity belt and miss-quoting Shakespeare to form a condemnation of T.B. doesn't bring a smile to your face, then the sight of Gene Wilder in the throws of foreplay with a sheep will probably do little to convert you. Humour for the most is juvenile, puerile and immature, but carried off with such hilarious comedic style, that the Farrelly brothers should really reassess their careers. Allen is as likable as ever in his many surreal incarnations -- appearing in fifty percent of the sketches -- his ultimate triumph being the oily, Italian play-boy causing a stir when he and his frigid girlfriend par-take of a little outdoor nookie. And even if he is less confident when trying to be socio-satirical, as in the molestation game show, Woody still manages to inject a wit and ingenuity to the proceedings, always carrying off the gags to his trademark self-deprecating style.

However, despite technical assuredness, the finished product borders on the same hit and miss territory that befalls most anthology films, however, it has to be handed to Allen for making a genuinely intelligent movie that basically celebrates boob-gags and outbursts of rampant misogyny. The best policy with 'Everything you always wanted to know...' is to ignore the false starts of the later segments, and howl at the sight of Woody fighting a giant breast ("Don't worry, I know how to handle tits"). Nevertheless, if your idea of sophisticated humour doesn't include bestiality, orgasms, transvestism, homosexuality, ejaculation, perversion or Burt Reynolds, then feel free to give it a miss.

Ever since the mid-70s, I have had a nostalgia for Woody Allen's early films. Everyone needs to grow, it's just that I think Woody has grown in the wrong direction. In the films that followed "Annie Hall" he seemed to be trying to be Bergman at times and Fellini at others, when I always thought he was better just being Woody. Why? Because he was funny, and this film is the funniest of them all.

This is Woody at his zaniest, his most anarchic, his most irreverent, his wildest. It is zany in the same sense that the Marx Brothers were at their height. He isn't afraid to have segments that are just plain crazy and unbelievable. I wonder if David Reuben realized that Woody was actually mocking his book when he sold the rights. A classic. 8/10

Woody Allen is sometimes regarded as one of America's more eccentric filmmakers, and his decision to acquire the film rights to David Reuben's sex guide "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)" must, at first sight, have seemed one of his more eccentric ventures. I mean, just how do you make a film of a sex manual, without turning it into pornography? Allen, however, clearly thought that the title was too good to resist, and his solution was to make the film as a series of seven sketches, a structure influenced by the Monty Python style of comedy. (The Python's first feature film "And Now For Something Completely Different", also made as a series of short sketches, had come out the previous year). Each sketch is given the title of a question from Dr. Reuben's book.

As with a number of films of this type (a later Python film "The Meaning of Life" being a good example) the individual sketches very enormously in quality. The good:- "What Happens During Ejaculation?". This seems to be the sketch that most people remember the film for. I am not sure whether there was any direct inspiration, but the central conceit, namely that the human body is actually controlled by small humanoid creatures living inside it, seemed very similar to that of "The Numskulls", a cartoon strip from a British comic. The sketch depicts what happens to the owner of the body during a sexual encounter with his girlfriend, and stands out for the contributions of Burt Reynolds as a brain cell and Allen himself as a sperm. The joke is that spermatozoa form a crack paratroop-style military unit who have sworn an oath to fertilise the woman's ovum "or to die in the attempt". They all have the sort of gung-ho personalities familiar from war films, all except Allen's character who is cowardly, nervous and self-doubting. (But then, what Allen character isn't?) The most brilliantly funny part of the film.

"What Are Sex Perverts?" This section, filmed in black-and-white, features a game show called "What's My Perversion?", an obvious parody of "What's My Line?". The humour comes from the incongruity between the mood of the show and its subject matter as the four panellists discuss in the cheerful, breezy tone typical of fifties and sixties game shows whether the seemingly respectable middle-aged contestant is a rapist or a voyeur. (It turns out that his perversion is "Likes to expose himself on a subway"). Some have criticised this sketch as tasteless, but a bit of tastelessness is needed for a film like this to succeed; no-one ever made a successful sex comedy by scrupulously observing the canons of good taste.

These, however, were the only segments that I really enjoyed. The indifferent:-

"Do Aphrodisiacs Work?", or the story of a mediaeval king's jester who attempts to seduce the queen, but is foiled by her chastity belt. Nothing particularly original in this, despite attempts to work in references to Shakespeare's Hamlet, but there is some humour to be derived from seeing the standard Woody character, the angst-ridden 20th century urban intellectual, transported back to mediaeval Europe.

Why Do Some Women Have Trouble Reaching an Orgasm?, which deals with a woman (played by Woody's ex-wife Louise Lasser) who can only become sexually aroused when making love in public. This section appears to have been designed as either a parody of, or affectionate homage to, the Italian cinema of the fifties and sixties, and is entirely in Italian with English subtitles. This struck me as a bit of a gimmick, although those who are more familiar than I with the back catalogues of Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini might find something to enjoy.

And finally the bad:- "Are the Findings of Doctors and Clinics Who Do Sexual Research and Experiments Accurate?" This was obviously intended as a parody of cheap fifties horror films, but Woody clearly had difficulty integrating this particular concept into his overall scheme of making a series of sketches on the theme of sex. The central character is, ostensibly, a Kinsey-style sexologist who turns out to be a Frankenstein-type mad scientist, complete with an assistant named Igor. The scenes of a gigantic breast bouncing across the countryside are a feeble attempt at surrealism, like something from one of the most contrived Python sketches.

"Are Transvestites Homosexuals?" and "What is Sodomy?" I bracket these two segments together because both share the same fault; neither is in the least funny. The first, predictably enough, is about a man who likes to dress up in women's clothes; the second, perhaps less predictably, is about a doctor who falls in love with a sheep. (In normal usage the word "sodomy" refers to anal sex, not to sex with animals; perhaps Dr. Reuben's book did not deal with the subject of bestiality). Perhaps in 1972, in the early days of the so-called sexual revolution, it seemed daring merely to mention areas of human sexuality which had previously been taboo.(It is impossible to imagine a mainstream Hollywood film of this nature being made in 1952, or even 1962). Woody seems to have imagined that all he had to do was to refer to these two subjects, without bothering to treat them with any wit or humour, for people to start laughing. That might have worked in 1972 (although I doubt it); it certainly doesn't work today.

Five bad or indifferent sketches out of seven is not a very good strike rate, but I have given this film an above-average mark, largely because I couldn't stop laughing at the "sperm" sketch. 6/10