Saturday, December 2, 2017

Fairy Tales (1978)



Twisting children’s stories to insert adult subject matter is nothing new, so it’s not as if Fairy Tales—a sleazy sex comedy with musical numbers—gets points for novelty. In fact, it doesn’t get points for much of anything, though an honest review must acknowledge that perhaps one of every hundred jokes approaches wit. Furthermore, a couple of the songs are executed competently. Beyond those not-worth-the-trouble attributes, Fairy Tales is dreary. A prince awakes on his 21st birthday and discovers expectations that he will soon copulate, presumably as a means of demonstrating his ability to produce heirs, so three old men—his “sexperts”—provide a compliant woman who strips off her clothes and mounts the prince. He fails to perform, explaining that he only has eyes (and sex drive) for someone named Princess Beauty, occasioning a quest to find her. Along the way, the prince meets a horny Little Bo Peep (“I’m up to my ass in smelly old sheep!”), an oversexed Snow White (who sings about her “seven times a night” living arrangement), a frustrated Jill (turns out Jack is gay), and, eventually, the Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe. She’s a madam, and her shoe is a brothel with lots of kinky BDSM chambers. (The Andrews Sisters-type number featuring naked dominatrixes is particularly distasteful.) Like other low-budget sex comedies of the ’70s, Fairy Tales is so boring to watch that one’s mind wanders to questions about the film’s creation. How did the producers find so many women willing to humiliate themselves onscreen? Why did so many has-been and/or never-were comedians agree to participate? And what the hell is Motown singer Martha Reeves doing here as a witchy chick singing a disco number from inside a smoking cauldron? Whatever. Even contemplating these notions for a moment requires giving Fairy Tales more time than it deserves.

Fairy Tales: LAME

No comments: