Not for the easily offended, 1977’s The Kentucky Fried Movie was the first cinematic outing from the writers who brought us Airplane!, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker. Composed of a series of vignettes that take on, well, almost everything, the movie feels like Saturday Night Live writ large… boisterous and free of television network censorship. With copious nudity and bad language, The Kentucky Fried Movie shocks as much as it entertains (if you have a delicate sensibilty).
I, of course, have no such sensitivity, and think it’s quite funny… though, as a film, it’s wildly uneven and the humor is definitely low-brow. There’s a sense of “We can’t believe we’re getting away with this” to the whole proceeding, and they throw gags at the audience with no restraint. The highlight of the film is an extended segment that is parodies 1970s Kung Fu action movies called “A Fistful of Yen.” It’s great, and a trial run for the type of extended genre parody that the ZAZ team did so well for over a decade (though the jokes mocking Asian accents were tired even way back in ’77).
The Kentucky Fried Movie was also the second film directed by John Landis (the poster for his first film, Schlock, appears in a theatre window in an early scene). We can see in this film an early preview of the type of minimalistic directing that became his signature (he locked his camera down more often than not). It is also the first film that features his runnng joke, the film-within-a-film “See you next Wednesday” (here presented in ‘feel-a-round’). Landis also cameos as a morning-TV show producer who tries, unsuccessfully, to restrain a gorilla played by Rick Baker. Other notable cameos include Bill Bixby, Henry Gibson, George Lazenby, Donald Sutherland, and the Zucker brothers themselves.
Is it coincidence that I followed up revisting Psycho IV (which features an extended Landis cameo) with this film? Actually, yes, it is… but the coincidence makes me think about his filmography, and what might have been… He followed up this film with Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London. and Trading Places… all fine films. Then, the helicopter accident happened… the accident that killed Vic Morrow and two children on the set of Landis’ Twilight Zone: The Movie. After that (and for a long while) Landis spent more time in court than he did making films, and the movies he did make during and after that time were… well, to be kind, let’s just say they didn’t match the quality of his previous work.
Heavy thoughts when reviewing such slight fare such as The Kentucky Fried Movie, but the mind goes where it goes… and I can’t help but hope that we still have one good film yet to come from the mind of John Landis. At any rate, The Kentucky Fried Movie is an amusing work that is a fine waste of time. If you haven’t seen it, seek it out.
Error fetching Flickr photos: A feed could not be found at `https://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photoset.gne?lang=en-us&format=feed-rss_200&nsid=josephdickerson&set=72157629700888492&per_page=20`; the status code is `404` and content-type is `text/html; charset=UTF-8`