There was a time when this might have been considered a cool and humorous glimpse of sexual taboos. Alas, time has not been kind to this film which now is so dated, unprovocatively un-pc and simply not funny. Gene Wilder briefly brings a smile to the Sheep sketch but otherwise there are better ways to spend 90 minutes.
Woody took the title and a few of the chapter headings from a contemporary book addressing sexual anxiety and constructed a series of sketches on the theme of erotic diversity.
It is his most farcical film. There is little genuine wit, and it operates on the edge of good taste; what we now call gross-out comedy. As with Gene Wilder's affair with a sheep. The characters explore a number of absurd fetishes and the actors play it very straight and the comedy is the contrast between the two.
Probably the best episode is where Woody and Louise Lasser engage in public sex, in a very close pastiche of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. More typical is the Universal horror send up with people being smothered to death by an enormous rampant breast.
It works because the ideas are so outrageous (though time has taken the edge of how extraordinary they once seemed). And because the tone of the acting is so perfect. Lynn Redgrave was particularly great as a medieval queen stuck in her chastity belt having been given an aphrodisiac. It was a genre that really arrived more fully with the National Lampoon films (such as Animal House) and The Kentucky Fried Movie in the late seventies.