UHF

Another of the movies that I got the chance to record thanks to the free preview of the Showtime channels that I'm getting is UHF. It's going to be on again tomorrow, Sept. 30, at 2:30 PM on Showtime Family. (Note that Titan TV, which I normally use for listings on the premium channels, has Showtime Women in the slot occupied by Showtime Family, and for some reason doesn't have Showtime Family at all.) Once again, with that in mind, I sat down to watch UHF and do a report on it here.

"Weird" Al Yankovic plays George, who works at a series of odd jobs together with his friend Bob (David Bowe). The reason it's a series of odd jobs is because George has an extremely vivid imagination that causes him to daydream, constantly getting him fired from one job after another. It also causes him to forget things like dates with his long-suffering girlfriend Teri (Victoria Jackson).

Meanwhile, George has an uncle Harvey (Stanley Brock) who has a penchant for gambling. One night while playing poker, Harvey wins an unusual prize, as somebody put the ownership of local independent station Channel 62 in the pot, which Harvey won. Harvey doesn't have much use for a TV station, and certainly has no idea how to run it. However, he's got a nice nephew in need of a job, so he decides to make George the new station manager.

What George, who brings Bob along with him, finds is a station that's in terrible condition. Nobody watches the programs, and it's constantly being beaten in the ratings by Channel 8, which has a network affiliation and is run by overbearing R.J. Fletcher (Kevin McCarthy in a deliberately over-the-top role). George returns a package the mail sent to him instead of Channel 8, and finds Fletcher chewing out janitor Stanley Spadowski (Michael Richards), so Fletcher offers him a job as Channel 62 janitor since the place needs a janitor and Stanley needs a job.

Channel 62 is so hard up for programming that George is reduced to hosting the kids' show himself, to the great distress of both George and the few kids watching it. One day he gets fed up and decides to go to a bar, giving Stanley the chance to host the show. Stanley turns out to be a whack job, but the sort of whack job that kids love to watch, leading the show to become a surprise ratings hit.

George and everybody else at the station come up with ever more bizarre and ridiculous ideas for TV shows that strike the popular zeitgeist, leading the channel to become #1 in the ratings, pissing Fletcher off. When Harvey gets some gambling debts, Fletcher sees his chance....

There's not much to the story of UHF, and the story of little guy in business taking on the big guy is one that's been done a lot. What makes UHF so appealing is the way the story is presented. If Paddy Chayefsky had taken Network and decided to make it not a black comedy but a light comedy with no pretensions of social commentary, he might have come up with something like UHF. (Unsurprisingly, among the many pop culture references in UHF is one to the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any longer" scene in Network.)

UHF, following the opening sequence parodying Raiders of the Lost Ark, is slow for a while, but really picks up once Stanley becomes a ratings hit, with some truly wacky show ideas if you get the cultural references of the late 1980s. If, however, you don't know who someone like Morton Downey Jr., to take just one example, was, then you might not find the references so funny.

Don't expect high cinematic art from UHF. Just sit back and think back to the days of the late 1980s, and have fun watching a warped take on the whole thing.