Wake Me When It's Over is a zany service comedy in which Ernie Kovacs plays the latest in his long line of military captains. Kovacs and his men are stationed at a dead-end Japanese island. World War II vet Dick Shawn, redrafted through a clerical error, arrives on the island and decides to liven things up. Using the materials at hand, he supervises the building of a hotel, using the island girls as the staff. The military brass investigate when it's obvious than the servicemen are having too much fun on the island. Kovacs would love to have Shawn stay, and says so at Shawn's court-martial, but the reluctant draftee is mustered out of the service as accidentally as he'd been brought back in. Ernie Kovacs and Dick Shawn work so well together in Wake Me When It's Over that one can only feel an intensified loss over the early deaths of these two comic masters.
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide