Grimm’s Fairy Tales for Adults is at least accurate to the title – it adapts three well-known Grimm Brothers fairytales, those of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty/Little Brier-Rose and Cinderella. The film does a fair job of telling each of these tales, albeit truncatedly. Snow White is told essentially intact and would be recognized by anyone familiar with the original. The version of Cinderella here seems missing any scene where Cinderella drops her slipper and even of where she is initially wooed by the prince and is mostly concentrated on the scenes of the prince’s scouring the kingdom to find the owner of the slipper. The most variant of the tellings is Sleeping Beauty where the focus is not at all on the early part of the story where Sleeping Beauty is cursed, pricks her finger and goes to sleep, but rather on the very end (which comprises of two paragraphs in the Grimm version of the story) where the prince (here the two idiots) must venture through the forest of thorns and wake her with their kiss. Here, Sleeping Beauty turns out to be homely and spends the rest of the film wandering about looking for someone who will have sex with her and make the change permanent before the kingdom goes back to sleep. The Cinderella story is also prefaced by a preamble where the two idiots save her from being raped by a band of cannibalistic thieves, which in fact ends up being given more time than many of the classic parts of the fairytale. When it comes to the telling of Cinderella, one should complement the film for being more accurate to the Grimm version of the fairytale than any other film version – it retains the part where the stepmother conspires to get the two stepsisters to put on the slipper by cutting off one’s toe and the other’s heel, only for the prince to be alerted by a bird that whispers to look at the blood from the shoe (here the two idiots are transformed into birds by the witch).

Compared to most of today’s hardcore erotica/porn, Grimm’s Fairy Tales for Adults has an almost chaste innocence – the women rarely ever get undressed any more than displaying their breasts, there are very few pubic and no penetrative shots – and the emphasis is largely on a plot. The acting may not be the greatest but it is certainly better than that in most of today’s adult films where the actors look laughably stolid when required to do anything more than disrobe.

More than anything, Grimm’s Fairy Tales for Adults may be remembered for its sheer bizarreness. There is a surprising level of gore, with depiction of the stepsisters cutting parts of their feet off; the thieves and their barrels of severed limbs; and a scene where the Evil Queen sits down to eat Snow White’s severed sex organs. There is an odd sense of humour running through the film – like where Sleeping Beauty’s father, the king, wakes up in his bathtub and part way through the conversation a woman surfaces from beneath the water and he tells her “Not yet” and she goes back under again as he continues on his pronouncements as though nothing had happened. Although surely the most demented scene in the entire film is the one where Snow White tries to help the two idiots discover why their cow is not giving any milk and gets down and fellates one of its udders, followed by the two idiots each taking a turn.