Published via Ecency

(source: tmdb.org)

Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker (a.k.a. ZAZ) became the most successful creative trio in Hollywood of its time thanks to their brilliant directorial debut Airplane!, which is now considered to be one of the greatest parodies ever made. That success, as with almost anyone else, didn’t come out of thin air. The trio had to learn their craft, and the opportunity was taken when writing the screenplay for The Kentucky Fried Movie, a 1977 sketch comedy film directed by John Landis.

The structure of the film is such that it lacks anything like a plot and instead represents a series of sketches, with the possible framing device being a recurring news report that gives the impression that someone is channel-surfing on television. The sketches, which vary in length as well as in quality, represent parodies of what was popular on American television in the 1970s, but also of what was popular in drive-in or grindhouse cinemas. The latter consists mainly of fake trailers for various films of different genres, ranging from blaxploitation (“Cleopatra Schwartz”), disaster films (“That’s Armageddon”) and sexploitation films (“Catholic High School Girls in Trouble”). Television parodies relate to commercials, morning shows and educational films. A lot of the humour in the film is rather crude, often relying on bodily functions, racial or ethnic stereotypes and, naturally, sex, which plays a part in “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble”, which features Russ Meyer’s big-breasted muse Uschi Digard in a scene that might be somewhat graphic by today’s standards of parody, but which was acceptable in the more libertine 1970s. The longest, and in many ways the best, sketch in the film is “A Fistful of Yen”, which runs for almost half an hour and represents a brilliant parody of Bruce Lee’s martial arts classic Enter the Dragon, and in which Evan C. Kim plays the main character. Various big stars of the time, such as Bill Bixby, Henry Gibson, George Lazenby and Donald Sutherland, appear in cameo roles. John Landis directs the film very confidently, obviously discovering a taste for irreverent comedy that would serve him well in his next film, Animal House. ZAZ, on the other hand, used this film as a good testing ground for their concept of “saturation comedy” that they would use in Airplane!, but also realised the need for their comedies to have a tighter narrative structure. The Kentucky Fried Movie is sometimes referred to as the film that earned a place in history books as the first title to feature fake trailers. Audiences less interested in those details might find some of the humour too gross or dated, but in general, it provides more than a fair amount of laughs in its short running time.

RATING: 6/10 (++)