Candy (1968)

Candy is a deliriously strange pop-art fever dream from the late ’60s, the kind of glossy, anything-goes satire that keeps topping itself with one outrageous detour after another. It plays like a naughty fairy tale filtered through celebrity culture, with an absurdist parade of characters and a stacked cast clearly enjoying the joke—Marlon Brando’s presence alone feels like a punchline delivered with a straight face, and the film’s best stretches have a buoyant, mischievous rhythm. Beneath the bright colors and broad comedy, it’s poking at gurus, authority figures, and the era’s fashionable ideas about innocence and “enlightenment,” even when the humor is intentionally tasteless. Fair warning: it’s very much of its time, with sexual content and scenes that can feel more provocative than playful, but if you’re curious about swingin’ sixties cinema at its most audacious and surreal, Candy is an oddball curiosity that’s hard to forget.

Candy is aiming for a psychedelic, anything-goes sex farce that pokes at hypocrisy and “searching for meaning” with a parade of famous faces and surreal set pieces. The problem is it plays less like sharp satire and more like a chaotic string of skits, with humor that’s often dated and a tone that can feel sleazy rather than clever, especially given how casually it treats coercion and humiliation. If you’re expecting eroticism, wit, or a coherent fantasy adventure, this is more likely to irritate or exhaust you than amuse you. The main draw is the sheer oddity of it all—plus the novelty of the cast hamming it up—but it’s really only for viewers with a high tolerance for messy 60s counterculture “shock” comedy.