Those with a taste for embarrassing star turns will be in hog heaven now that 1968’s Candy is out on disc. A woeful attempt at anti-establishment, Takin’-It-To-the-Man satire, the film follows a gorgeous and improbably helpless young lady who is sexually molested by a series of authority figures. And yes, this is meant to be funny. Moreover, the novel it’s adapted from was a ‘take’ on Voltaire’s Candide. (Get it? Candy?) Talk about hubris.

It’s the film’s thespian firepower that makes it an appalling delight, though. Richard Burton is a poet who licks booze off the floor of his car and has sex with a manikin. Walter Matthau is an insane, paranoid army general. (Because what other kind is there, right?) Ringo Starr is a pigeon-English spouting Mexican gardener. James Coburn is a surgeon who loves fame more than his patients. John Astin — Gomez from TV’s The Addams Family — plays both Candy’s uncle and her father. And, yes, both have sex with her. Even a pre-fat Marlon Brando shows up, playing a fraudulent East Indian guru.

Be warned though. At over two hours, the film can seriously drag. This holds true particularly in the middle section, when they run out of name actors willing to humiliate themselves. Then the picture disjointedly moves from satire to surrealism, as with a hunchbacked crime boss who can run up and down walls like Spider-Man.

Candy was a big budget film, and it looks pretty smashing on disc. The mono sound is fine, free of glitches. However, given the bad electrical guitar score, this isn’t always a plus.

Extras include a trailer which is as bad as the movie itself, a still gallery, a bunch of talent files on the various actors who mistakenly choose to appear here, and two radio spots for the film. In other words, solid stuff, if unspectacular.

Those who elect to buy the special edition ‘tin’ get a DVD-sized round metal container for the disc, designed to look like a birth control pill dispenser, and some round, coaster-sized trading-type cards dedicated to the film’s stars.