People who like obscure movies probably know that Turkey made a bunch of no-budget versions of famous American movies: "The Wizard of Oz", "The Exorcist" and "ET", to name a few.
I had assumed that the Turkish rip-offs were the weirdest possible movies. However, I didn't know that the Soviet Union made its own version of "Mary Poppins"! "Meri Poppins, do svidaniya" has to be the most whacked-out movie ever made. A dancing cat, an animated statue, and so-bad-it's-good '80s music (yes, somehow the Soviet Union got its hands on that) all in one movie. Seriously, this flick is like a combination of a "Weird Al" Yankovic song, and something created by Hunter S. Thompson. To be certain, the Bert character - played by Dick Van Dyke in the more famous version - looks like a cross between Elliott Gould and Keith Richards; when they first showed him, I thought that it was someone in a Michael Myers mask (that's the killer in the "Halloween" movies, not the guy who played Austin Powers).
All in all, this is the sort of movie that could seemingly appear on "Mystery Science Theater 3000". I, for one, consider this flick to cool for that (I would have put the more famous version on "MST3K" in a second). This is one movie like nothing that you've ever seen.
PS: Mrs. Andrew was played by a man in drag. It surprises me that they were allowed to do that in the Soviet Union, where homosexuality was illegal.
