I'll say this for Barbarella: it is successful in its effort to put something on the screen that's never been put there before. But it begs the question: should this have been put on the screen?

I did enjoy the weird costumes and sets, kooky worlds, and bizarre intrigue in the movie. But that was it. The movie alternates between being insufferably dull and embarrassingly cheesy. The rules of the universe, so far as I can see, are random -- one moment little kids are sicking carnivorous dolls on the heroine, and in another she is being flown through the skies by a blind angel. The whole thing is essentially a sleazy runaway metaphor that could care less about the coherence of its disguise. What's the point?