Eric Stevenson This is the oldest parody movie I could find. Nowadays, we have horrendous spoof movies like "Disaster Movie" and it's sad to say that this might have set a precedent for those terrible movies. Granted, this is still "Airplane!" compared to those other movies. This is technically the worst James Bond movie. I said that I had already seen every James Bond movie ever made and this one was not an official one. It's also the longest spoof movie I've ever seen.That's a main flaw. It's mostly really rushed at the end and it isn't spread out well enough for all of these jokes. Interestingly enough, this may have set forth the idea that James Bond was a code name as it is here. A pity such a popular theory had to come from such a subpar movie. I will defend it a little on the grounds that it was the first of its kind and they didn't know what to work with. There's too many goofy things here like the cartoony cloud pills and the UFO that it comes off as stupid rather than funny. **

Mort Payne I remember loving this film years ago. Unfortunately, it has not aged well. The humor does not work. Aside from a few near misses, the jokes rely on blindingly obvious innuendo and over-padded wackiness (with Benny Hill style musical accompaniment, which gets annoying very, very fast). The women in the story are sex objects to the extreme. The script makes the sexploitation flicks of the early 70s look feministic. Most of the female "actors" were worse than amateur, but they were pretty, and each of their characters was in desperate search of a man to use them sexually. This hit a low when Bond's daughter implied an attraction to her father. Disgusting. Peter Sellers, once considered a genius, is more difficult to stomach every time I see him. The sound of his voice and his high-toned-grease accent are like nails on a chalkboard. I think what makes him even harder to take in this is that he was trying to play his part seriously (no kidding, folks: he wanted this to be an action flick, starring himself). The cinematography looks like it was done by a rich film student: very slick but laughably overdone. One scene cuts back and forth between Ursula Andress and Peter Sellers during a conversation, but the shots of Sellers show him speaking while sitting down, and the shots of Andress are slow motion shots of her doing awkward contortions while speaking. The effect is to make the scene look like the wrong shots of her were intercut with the right shots of Sellers. I gave it about 45 minutes before I realized I was laughing out of sympathy for the embarrassingly bad humor, and that the only reason to keep watching was the futile hope I might catch a flash of skin from one of the brainless bimbos that constantly flitted around the background in skimpy outfits or obscured partial nudity.

merrywater I dig the 60s spy movies. Yes, I truly love the era; it had a lot of class and sheer elegance. I love psychedelic music, and I love Peter Sellers, Burt Bacharach and Dusty Springfield too, but this is a completely inscrutable meltdown. Too many flavors and no recipe.Allegedly a spoof. Did people dig this back then? According to Wikipedia, Time labeled it "incoherent and vulgar vaudeville". It certainly doesn't work today.There are a number of similarities to the excellent "Deadlier than the male" of the same year which, on the contrary,is both stylish and amusing.A crackpot product, in the junkiest sense...

Red-Barracuda In order to be able to enjoy Casino Royale on any level you need to be willing to overlook a lot of problems. It had five directors who were originally meant to oversee their own mini-segments which would then go on to make up an anthology movie but in the end all of their work was stitched together as a single piece. Not only this but the actor originally pencilled in to play the James Bond role, Peter Sellers, left the production before the end leaving his filmed parts incomplete and resulting in re-writes to the plot leading to David Niven being wheeled in to play a retired Bond as well as other actors playing Bond clones. Confused? You certainly should be! The factors mentioned above went some considerable way to make Casino Royale such a monumentally incoherent and unstructured film. I lost the plot, so to speak, several times during this. Characters come and go, plot threads go nowhere or abruptly end and lots of things just…happen. All of this results in a plot-line that never bothers to take itself seriously, so why the hell should we? Indeed, the very the fact it's such an obvious shambles is part of what makes it so interesting to look back on.The best way to approach this movie is to just take each scene individually and not spend too much effort piecing them together logically. The phrase the individual parts work better than the whole seems to have been coined with this film in mind. There's no question that its ludicrously overlong for what it is and it's undeniable that it's very bloated and self-indulgent. It wouldn't be unfair either to say that it really only has a few good ideas sprinkled throughout its epic run-time. Yet, for all that, it is deliciously of-it's-time and a true one-off. It was an unofficial Bond film because of an ownership issue that meant that the novel 'Casino Royale' could not be used by the official Bond franchise Eon before the end of the century. Consequently, it was made by an entirely different production company and, for some reason they decided that the best approach would be to make it a spy-spoof that parodied the Bond films.It is notable for its enormous ensemble cast, most of whom must have wondered just what in hell they were doing. David Niven plays Bond as a gentleman spy who is diametrically opposite in style and approach to any other cinematic depiction of the famous secret agent. Orson Welles appears as the master criminal and he and Sellers took an instant dislike to one and other resulting in huge tensions on set. A youthful Woody Allen appears as Bond's nephew and was responsible for all of the laugh-out-loud moments for me. The great actress Deborah Kerr also appears as M's wife in a strange extended sequence set in Scotland. But maybe best of all is the conveyor-belt of gorgeous ladies who were Euro sex symbols of the time – we have Ursula Andress as a secret agent (looking better here than ever before), Joanna Pettet plays Mata Hari's daughter in an extended unrelated segment and a young Barbara Bouchet appears as Miss Moneypenny's daughter. The lush lounge soundtrack by Burt Bacharach is rightfully famous too, including 'The Look of Love' with vocals by Dusty Springfield. And despite its utter senselessness, it is an undeniably gorgeous looking film with great art design and a brilliant cinematographer in Nic Roeg. Its colourful, psychedelic pop art aesthetic never really gets old. It's pretty easy to see where Mike Myers got most of his ideas for his 'Austin Powers' franchise. Casino Royale is certainly an acquired taste overall but if you can get beyond its incomprehensibility you could have a good enough time with its glorious 60's vibes.