Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry 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, like with almost anyone else, didn’t come of thin air. Trio had to learn their craft and the opportunity was taken when writing the screenplay for The Kentucky Fried Movie, 1977 sketch comedy film directed by John Landis.
Structure of the film is such that it lacks anything like plot and instead represents series of sketches with possible framing device being recurring news report that gives impression that someone is channel surfing on television. Sketches, that vary in length as well as in quality, represent parody of what was popular on American television in 1970s, but also 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 humour in the film is rather crude, often relying to bodily function, racial or ethnic stereotypes and, naturally, sex, which plays part in “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble”, which features Russ Meyer’s big breasted muse Uschi Digard in a scene which might be somewhat graphic for today’s standards of parody, but which was acceptable in more libertine 1970s. The longest, and in many ways, the best sketch in the film is “A Fistful of Yen”, which runs almost half an hour and represents the 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, like Bill Bixby, Henry Gibson, George Lazenby and Donald Sutherland, appear in cameo roles. John Landis directs film very confidently, obviously discovering taste for irreverent comedy that would serve him well in his next film Animal House. ZAZ, on the other hand, used this film as good testing ground for their concept of “saturation comedy” that would use in Airplane!, but also found the need for their comedies to have tighter narrative structure. The Kentucky Fried Movie is sometimes referred as the film that earned place in history books as the first title to feature fake trailers. Audience less interested in those details might find some of the humour too gross or dated, but in general, it provides more than fair amount of laughs in its short running time.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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