User reviews

Their first film 'And Now for Something Completely Different' was intended to introduce the group and their humour to the American market. It was nothing but their best and most silliest skits from their first two seasons of their British TV sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus from BBC television. By that there's no real systematic narrative here, unlike in their later efforts in 'The Holy Grail' and 'Life of Brian'. It's made up of a selection of individual skits, which were mostly hilarious, even though two or three fall short, but it moves along swiftly that you get caught up in the comically cheeky and downright nonsensical humour that had me mostly in stitches. There appealing ludicrousness bellows stupidity, but its done in a straight face, which makes it more the merrier. A lot of it makes fun at its own expense, but also mocks that of political correctness and Americanism. They were so clever in the way structured it and it stills stands up rather well today. But a quick warning their humour is an acquired taste that's for sure.

Some of these ambitious skits and segments are real ball, ranging from the lumberjack song, The dead parrot, The upper class twit of the year, Killer cars, Blackmail, Hungarian in the cigarette shop, the lion tamer and so much more. My favourite of the lot would be the Mountaineer expedition sign up. Going on throughout the film is Terry Gilliam's stunning and ultimately inventive cartoons which catch the eye and imagination. The animation is that of high standards and adds a whole new dimension to the silliness! You could see this eye for detail when he directed such flicks like 'Brazil' and 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'. The boys involved John Cleese, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam are nothing but entertaining in whatever they decide to come up with, by giving us a real good laugh.

This landmark comedy team is always a delight to behold. A must see for any fan, though I doubt they haven't seen it already.

This film really didn't need to be made - but at the time, after two excellent TV series, the Pythons were under pressure to produce a big-screen version for wider distribution.

Thus a number of sketches from the first two series were rewritten, tightened up, and re-enacted, entirely on film. The actual new material is probably around 2% of the script, and I hold the view that many of the sketches were inferior to their TV versions, and much of the better series 1 and 2 stuff (Spanish Inquisition, Silly Walks etc.) didn't even make it to ANFSCD for some reason.

It's interesting to watch the differences in production and compare this material to how it was originally done, and the new devices for linking one sketch to the next keep you on your toes.

But ultimately if you want to watch early python sketches, the TV versions are more rewarding.

To most hardcore Python fans, this film will be irrellevant, as they probably have every single sketch on DVD already, and this is essentially a "greatest hits album."

So I am going to direct this review at those who have never heard of Python before.

The film opens with a sketch called "How not to be seen," during which the narrator shoots several people in cold blood, blows people up, and then finally breaks down into hysterical laughter when he bombs a children's hospital.

This sketch is hillariously, gut bustingly funny. Why? That is the great mystery of Python. Is it the impeccable timing, the wonderful acting, or the peerless gags? Could be. But I think it is more the brilliant sense of anarchy and loony logic that makes them so brilliant. It was, after all, those people's own bloody fault they were shot; they could be seen!

Beyond this, there are the sketches that are so well known they have become cliches: the Dead Parrot sketch ("Listen mate, this parrot is dead! It's a stiff! Bereft of life it rests in peace; if you hadn't nailed it to the perch it would be pushing up the daisies! This is an ex-parrot!") the Lumberjack Song ("I chop down trees, I wear high heels suspenders and a bra!/I wish I'd been a girlie, just like my dear Mama!"), the Dirty Fork sketch ("A dirty, ugly smelly piece of cultlery!!") and so on.

There is still no substitute for watching the show. Indeed many of their best sketches aren't on here; the Cheese sketch, the Adventure Holiday sketch, and my personal favourite, the Eric the Fish sketch ("Why should I be TARRED with the epithet "loony" simply because I have a pet 'alibut?"). Still this is a fairly safe introduction to their unique (That's putting it mildly) brand of humour.

Monty Python used this collection of sketches from their first and second TV series (re-packaged and staged again) to break into the American market. A gamble, but a successful one.

All the greats are here – Parrot Sketch, Dirty Fork, Hell's Grannies, Fresh Fruit Self Defence, Marriage Guidance – and more besides. The animated links, specially created for the movie, are funny and well put-together: and new versions of Killer Cars and the story of the Spot are excellent. In many cases the film versions of the sketches outshine those in the TV series and are more memorable, particularly those which first appeared in series 1.

This is a very good introduction to the team and a strong reminder of their early work for the BBC.

"And Now For Something Completely Different" is a showcase of the kind of comedy that defines Monty Python's Flying Circus. The BBC comedy classic has a huge following worldwide, owing to its unique use of surreal humor. This movie is a collection of some of the Pythons' best from their first two seasons, including classics like "The Lumberjack Song" and "The Dead Parrot Sketch." One of the best factors of "Monty Python" was the eye-catching animations of Terry Gilliam. This movie is rich with his art, which includes the wacky B-movie spoof "The Killer Cars." This is a movie all Python fans should see, and one Python neophytes should use as an introduction.

Released in 1971, this first feature presentation by the zany Monty Python's troupe is very much like a "greatest hits" album where we have these very funny guys from the UK showcasing some of their most hilariously popular sketches and bizarre animated segments from their long-running TV series of the late 1960s.

For anyone who enjoys outrageously odd comedy, this film's compilation is really a fine introduction to Monty Python's peculiar and unique brand of humour.

Filled with all sorts of surreal slapstick and supreme silliness, this film includes such unforgettable, comic gems as - The World's Deadliest Joke, Upper-Class Twit Of The Year, Hells Grannies, Dead Parrot, and Nudge-Nudge-Wink-Wink, to name but a few.

For some guaranteed giggles and outright laughs, you can always rely on the Monty Python's gang to deliver the goods..... Check it out!

Containing various skits from the first two years of their famous wacky show, "And Now for Something Completely Different" was Monty Python's Flying Circus' first movie. Everyone knows the Dead Parrot, the Lumberjack Song, and such things. They must have just cracked up writing this stuff.

If absolutely nothing else, this movie (or their show) reminds us what humor should entail. If you've never seen any of Monty Python's work, this should explain it all to you, although you ought to be prepared to die laughing.

So remember, always use Crelm toothpaste!

It's an adjustment seeing classic bits of television comedy being repurposed for the cinema. The first-ever film by TV's Monty Python troupe offers an enjoyable, if rather restrained, showcase of reshot series excerpts.

What "And Now For Something Completely Different" lacks in originality, it makes up for in zaniness and wit. Meet a group of elderly ladies who terrorize city streets: "We like pulling the heads off sheep...and tea cakes."

Thrill to a fight to the death for the title "Upper-Class Twit of the Year:" "He doesn't know when he's beaten...He doesn't know when he's winning, either. He has no sort of sensory apparatus known to man."

Learn why British film directors don't like being called "Eddie Baby," "Angel Drawers," or "Frank," even if President Nixon has a hedgehog by that name.

It's also a chance to see the stars of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" with longer hair and shaggier sideburns, except for Terry Gilliam who makes just a couple of token appearances while sticking to animation. John Cleese steals much of the show with his delicious overacting, yet Eric Idle makes the strongest impression as everything from a randy marriage counselor to one of Hell's Grannies. Meanwhile, Terry Jones squints, Michael Palin smirks, and Graham Chapman disapproves of everything. None are as sensational as they would become, but all make impressions.

For all that it has going for it, "And Now" connects only about half the time. Gilliam's animation seems slower and more ponderous here than it did on television, and the one-joke nature of his cartoons gets exposed in a way they didn't as television interstitials. A kind of pokiness cuts into the live-action material as well, like bits involving mice that squeal on key when hit with a hammer and men with tape recorders up their noses. Each of these may be only a minute or so, but they feel much longer.

Several of Python's best-loved sketches don't appear here, like the Ministry of Silly Walks, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Crunchy Frog. The best-known sketch that does appear, the Dead Parrot, is actually a little dead itself for some reason. Director Ian MacNaughton was Python's usual director for television, and if anything shoots things in an even flatter manner here than he did for the BBC. Perhaps it's because television was Python's medium, for the way it offered a kind of subversive platform for their entertainments.

Other sketches do shine. The Funniest Joke in the World is a great laugh unless you're German, in which case view with caution. Even better is the Milkman sketch, which demonstrates the pitfall of falling for the wrong woman.

Overall, "And Now" makes for a fine Python primer, a starter course as another reviewer suggests. It's not a landmark film, or even that major a milestone by Python standards, but it delivers some laughs along with a sense of what these guys were about.

I'm very sad when people don't GET Monty Python, and I believe that the measley 7.2 rating this great movie got is a reflection of this, that's such a tragedy. Everybody who has a good sense of humor must rent this movie, because it is a film classic. The only catch is, you have to be in the right mood where totally random things are funny. Hey--you can't be in a goofy mood and GET a drama, like American History X, for example. So get in a goofy mood, watch this movie, go buy a parrot, and I only have one more thing to say--and now for something completely different.

To criticize AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT on the grounds of obsolescence would seem an heretical thing to do. Monty Python had such a profound influence on the development of British comedy in the late Sixties and Seventies that their place in history is perpetually assured. And yet looking at the film nearly forty-five years later, it has to be said that much of the humor is puerile, the kind of thing that might be expected in a student production performed at the end of the spring semester. Some of the sketches go on far too long, while the more surreal moments - such as the opening sequence, involving a series of people trying not to be seen and getting blown up - are highly reminiscent of THE GOON SHOW, the groundbreaking radio program of the Fifties that provide much of Python's antecedents.

Nonetheless, for those that grew up with Python on television, film and the theater (as well as those fortunate enough to attend their series of concerts last year), AND NOW ... contains several immortal moments, such as the Parrot sketch, the upper-class twit of the year and the Lumberjack song. It's also interesting to reflect on what happened to the performers: Michael Palin, the singer in the last-named of these sketches, would eventually go on to become an established television documentary presenter and all-round celebrity appearing on innumerable tribute programs; while John Cleese would end up carving out a career as a film actor and (latterly) an autobiographer.

Some of the sketches could now be considered both sexist and racist; there are at least two occasions where viewers are encouraged to look at half-naked women and ogle them in a spirit more reminiscent of THE BENNY HILL SHOW than Monty Python. There is also one moment of dialog - obviously meant parodically - where Eric Idle talks about not wanting to live next door to "those kind of people" i.e. African-Caribbeans. Nonetheless, we should bear in mind that AND NOW ... is very much a product of its time; in the early Seventies such attitudes were still considered permissible (the ITV sitcom LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR had the white protagonist continually insulting his African-Caribbean neighbor). The location filming (such as it is) conjured up a now-vanished world of inner London, with traffic-free streets and a predominantly white population.

Definitely worth a look, but don't expect anything too humorous, especially if viewers are unfamiliar with the Pythons.

There are more than a couple of peak Monty Python ultra funny sketches in there. But there is also a majority of trash and "worse I've ever seen" Monty Python also, filled with too much of that collage montage non-sense to fill the gaps and make the runtime big enough to be considered a film.

In the end, they didn't even tried to make a coherent movie but just an excuse to put unrelated sketches that they didn't know how to connect (apparently from the first two seasons of their show, but recreated for the movie).

It's just bad.

Do we really have to grade this among the other Pythons films, as best, worst or anything? Personally I don't feel like to. It's surely not my best, but its got some fine characteristics. It's pure early Pythons.

Actually it's no film, it's a non-stop trip of absurd humour, featuring shorts, lots of animations, silly commentary, politically incorrect, 100% English jokes, some of which are REALLY silly - the difference here is that we have a commentary within the film which blames of the film which really has taken a wrong turn and has become quite silly. Self parody, originality and sarcasm. And embarrassment, of course!

About the animations: Python animations (made by the masterman Terry Gilliam) are awesome. No insult here, I really enjoyed the film, even the silliest bits, but the animations are so good that they're the best in this one, as far as I am concerned. So the animations are mixed and edited within managing to create a genuine Python style.

Those not familiar with Pythons, I recommend to start over with LIFE OF BRYAN or HOLY GRAIL. Actually its quite 'difficult' humour but give it a try if you like something different!

For me compilation tapes don't really work, but because each sketch included in this has been acted out again and edited it works really well. This is one of my favourite films. Although many great Python sketches were left out, the ones that were left in were truly some of the Pythons best work. It's a hilarious film thats full of really intelligent humour.

Every scene is godlike. I laughed for 80 minutes straight.

The phrase "And Now for Something Completely Different" originated with the British television personality Christopher Trace, who as presenter of the children's programme Blue Peter used it to link items on differing topics. It was taken up by other TV programmes and became a catchphrase on "Monty Python's Flying Circus", so much so that it was used as the title when the Pythons made their first film in 1971. Rather bizarrely, the film was produced by Victor Lownes, of Playboy fame, who saw it as the ideal way to introduce Americans to the mysteries of the Python cult.

Unlike the other three Python films ("Monty Python and the Holy Grail", "Monty Python's Life of Brian" and "The Meaning of Life"), this one does not contain any original material. It consists of sketches taken from the first two series of the TV show, linked by some of Terry Gilliam's surreal animation sequences. The sketches were not taken direct from the television version but were specially remade for the film; some of them were slightly rewritten. I remember getting into a heated debate with a school friend, now a distinguished Professor of History at Oxford, about whether the famous "Dead Parrot Sketch" contains the lines "It has rung down the curtain and joined the choir eternal"; it turned out that I had seen the film version, which does contains these lines, and he had seen the television one, which doesn't.

Although, as the "Not the Nine O'clock News" team once pointed out, Britain is still ostensibly a Python-worshipping country, Pythonesque humour is an acquired taste, and attempting to explain its appeal to anyone who is not a Python-worshipper is a forlorn hope. (I have tried, and failed miserably, with my wife). This is probably a generational thing; I belong to that generation which came of age in the seventies and which prided itself on its ability to repeat Python sketches verbatim, but even in that period there was a large part of the older generation which reacted to the show in much the same way as Graham Chapman's colonel. "This is getting silly. And a bit suspect, I think". As for anyone born since 1980, and many people born since 1970, I suspect that they may regard the show with the same bafflement that my generation reserved for old radio shows like ITMA. ("Did people really use to laugh at that?")

Even as a practising Pythonist I have to admit that not all the sketches in "And Now For Something Completely Different" are hilarious; "Musical Mice", for example, does not seem nearly so funny today as it probably once did, and some of the animation segments now look a bit dated. There is not much to link the various sketches together, so film does not flow in the same way as "The Holy Grail" or "Life of Brian", both of which consisted of a series of linked sketches which together formed a coherent narrative. Nevertheless, much of the material here is brilliantly funny.

My particular favourites include:-

Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook (In which John Cleese's Hungarian gentlemen is misled by an inaccurate phrasebook into repeating phrases like "Please will you fondle my buttocks" or "My hovercraft is full of eels" in the belief that he is asking something innocuous like "Where is the railway station?")

Hell's Grannies (A takeoff of the rather earnest tone of British television documentaries of the period).

The Funniest Joke in the World (Or how our boys won the war by telling lethally funny jokes to the Germans).

Dead Parrot (In which Cleese tries to persuade a sceptical Michael Palin that the parrot he has just purchased is dead, is a stiff, is no more, has ceased to be and has shuffled off this mortal coil. Perhaps the Pythons' best-known sketch).

Vocational Guidance Counsellor (Or the sketch which did for the accountancy profession what the Black Death did for mediaeval Europe)

Blackmail!

Upper Class Twit of the Year . When I first saw this, I assumed that the Upper Class Twits were purely fictitious; it was only when I was invited by my then girlfriend to accompany her to a meeting of the Kensington and Chelsea Young Conservatives that I realised that the Pythons' satire was, if anything, rather understated.

Like a number of other reviewers, I noticed that some of my favourite sketches (The Spanish Inquisition, The Australian Philosophers, Ministry of Silly Walks, etc.) were omitted from the film, although some of those that other reviewers were hoping to see, such as the exploding penguin, appeared in the third or fourth series of the programme and hence had not been written when this film was made. Nevertheless, I think that the Pythons were right to limit the amount of material and hence the length of the film to 90 minutes. The Monty Python format was originally designed for thirty-minute programmes, and would probably have become tedious if it had been dragged out to two hours or more. (This is what happens with "The Meaning of Life", which starts to drag towards the end). "And Now For Something Completely Different" is not the Pythons' greatest film- that must be "Life of Brian"- but it still contains plenty to laugh at. 8/10

Maybe this isn't the best Monty Pyton has done, but there are some of the finest Flying Circus in between. I mean, The joke that is so funny, that you die laughing, and how to stay camouflaged are really funny. If you do like Monty Pyton this is a must.

This film could have been a lot better than they let it turn out. I know it's supposed to be Monty Python's best sketches from their first two seasons of television work, but it has ultimately a couple of good ones and a lot of boring ones. I recommend watching their feature films and disregarding this unless you are a true Python fan.

Monty Python's second best movie. It's not a feature length story, but a bunch of sketches. Funniest things I've seen this side of Holy Grail. Other people say that the sketches are boring. Well, they're just plain wrong. From the dramatic recreation of Pearl Harbor to Hell's Grannies this is well worth a rental.

Rather than see it as an introduction to the Python, I saw this just to see the only other Python film that was PG in the US. I had seen "Monty Python And The Holy Grail," which wasn't as funny (A killer rabbit? Policemen arresting knights? A knight killing innocent people for no reason? IS NOT FUNNY! --small giggle--). I actually laughed more at this than at "Holy Grail," possibly because it wasn't just one thing with a few things different--it was almost always completely different!

Having seen 1.03 episodes of the show, I must say that though they seem to have a longer time with the sketches because it wasn't restrained to about 5 minutes ("The Deadliest Joke In The World" had more content that I would have liked to see in this), this had more sketches and was much funnier. Their best movie (even though lots are saying that they could have done better). Rating: 4/6 (for being rrreeeaaalllyyy weird)

I don't know why I didn't get more out of this. Several isolated times a stern and sober British Army officer is interpolated and announces to the viewers that this isn't worth watching because "it's silly -- just silly." I ruefully found myself often agreeing.

I don't suppose there's any point in trying to outline a plot because there is none. It's a series of sketches evidently gotten from their TV show. I first heard the "dead parrot" sketch on the radio and thought it was hilarious. Now, seeing it on the screen, it seems to have lost much of its voltage. Nor did I find it so amusing when a despondent man leaves a building, stops to think for a moment, and a huge iron weight falls on him and he splats under it.

It's possible that this particular material is already familiar, so that watching the film is like hearing a joke for the second or third time. It's also likely that it doesn't seem so fresh or amusing because some of it is dated. The movie was put together in 1971, when much of Western society was in turmoil -- race riots in the streets, an unpopular war in a country no one could identify on a blank map, gays screaming out of the closet, widespread sexual indulgence, bloodshed in Northern Ireland, pop tunes encouraging revolution, that sort of thing. But it's all gone or at least abated today. So the "Granny gangs" don't resonate the way they did at the time. At the same time, the "upper-class twit" sketch still gets laughs. I mean, hunting live rabbits that are staked out and spread-eagled on the ground! Trying to commit suicide by shooting one's self -- and missing. I'm laughing now, just rerunning it in my mind.

Each of their four features were to improve monotonically, with "The Meaning of Life" nearing perfection of the style. That last one is mature. Well, mature for Monty Python. And it's both engaging and carries a covert theme of the utmost seriousness. The Granny Gangs are long gone, but questions about the meaning of life, or the absence of meaning, still plague us.