An overloaded, underplotted adaptation of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg's notorious comic novel, 1968's Candy was one of the biggest flops of the '60s, remaining out of circulation for decades despite a cast that includes Marlon Brando, John Huston, James Coburn, Richard Burton, and Walter Matthau. Rescued from movie limbo, Candy is finally available on a no-frills DVD, where its flaws remain apparent some 33 years after it first failed to capture the cultural zeitgeist. A grounded Barbarella with satirical pretensions, Candy, based loosely on Candide, follows the adventures of nubile Ewa Aulin, who encounters an endless series of leering, arrogant archetypes—the doctor, the filmmaker, the military man, and so on—each representing a different aspect of the corrupt establishment. A scene in which self-obsessed, drunken poet Richard Burton (engaging in self-parody at its most painful) delivers a gaseous monologue before attempting to grope Aulin establishes the film's formula early on, with superstar after superstar attempting to impress, then fondle, Candy's blank-eyed protagonist. Essentially a one-joke film whose sole satirical conceit (reducing the sum of civilization into one dirty old man in various guises) isn't particularly strong to begin with, Candy gets off to a rickety start and only picks up occasionally as it limps through a bloated 124-minute running time. Screenwriter Buck Henry turns Southern and Hoffenberg's raunchy tome into a compendium of barely related skits and monologues, while director Christian Marquand shows little flair for comedy, leaving his hammy cast to compete with Aulin's oft-bared flesh and Dean Tavoularis' elaborately gaudy production design for the audience's attention. As a symbol of '60s excess, Candy maintains a perverse appeal, but it's a dated relic best left in the era whose trippy self-indulgence it so clearly embodies.