Kentucky Fried Movie

Another one of those movies I had heard about as having a bit of a cult status, but never actually getting to see, is Kentucky Fried Movie. TCM ran it some months back, so I recorded it in order to be able to watch it and finally do a post on it. As you can guess, I have now watched it which is why you're getting that post.

Having said that, Kentucky Fried Movie is going to be a tough movie to do a traditional review on. It was made by the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team at the beginning of their career, and the success of the movie allowed them to go on to bigger and better things like Airplane! and the Naked Gun movies. Kentucky Fried Movie is, like those later movies, a broad spoof/satire, but with one big difference. The later movies have overarching plots into which to fit all the spoofs.

Kentucky Fried Movie, on the other hand, is more of a sketch comedy, not even an anthology, so there's not that much to tie the various sketches together. Ostensibly, there's a "movie within a movie" along with "coming attractions" that spoof other movies, and the sort of local TV broadcast in which you might see advertisements for the sort of movies being spoofed here. In fact, the movie starts with a broadcaster talking about what's going to be coming up on the 11:00 news, a broadcaster who comes up multiple times during the movie, along with a local morning talk show segment.

Among the movie genres being spoofed are 70s exploitation movies and the all-star disaster genre, the latter including cameos from Donald Sutherland and George Lazenby. The biggest parody, and the one that's the "movie within a movie", is "A Fistful of Yen", parodying kung-fu movies. Unfortunately, I found it to be the weakest part of the movie, and a part that really drags on.

The TV portions also include several advertisements that those who remember vintage advertisements will probably enjoy. That, and the sort of instructional movie those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s would have seen in school, along with a few extended parodies of TV show genres.

There's also a lot of sex, which makes it a bit of a surprise that the movie got the wider release it did, although also makes it understandable why Kentucky Fried Movie has the cult status it does.

Does the material work? Some of it does, but for me not enough of it did. A lot of contemporary critics unsurprisingly found the material -- especially the raunchiness -- juvenile, although that's not what put me off. For me, it was more that a lot of the humor in Kentucky Fried Movie is the sort where it feels like "you had to be there", and I don't just mean that you had to be old enough to have seen it on its original release in 1977. Yes, some of the material does require knowing now-dated references (the "Point/Counterpoint" that preceded Andy Rooney at the close of 60 Minutes being one example), but even then a good portion of it came across as stuff that really felt funny to a group of friends spitballing ideas late at night where people not at the spitballing sessions aren't in on it. Combined with the kung fu spoof portion of the film being the least funny and going on the longest, it all adds up to Kentucky Fried Movie being less of a hit for me than for other people.