Tasteless, crass yet unevenly funny at times, "The Kentucky Fried Movie" scores points for wanting to offend and for being terminally offensive and gross. For those who love scatalogical humor, women's breasts are featured in ubiquity. It is a movie for those who love puerile junk food comedic segments delivered with some actual intelligence.
This was the ZAZ (Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker) comedy team's first movie with John Landis as director, himself making his second feature. "Kentucky Fried Movie" (based on the team's own improv theatre) is a comedy spoof movie featuring segments that can be alternately funny and cruel yet the overall laughs by my meter are hit-or-miss (less so with the ZAZ teams later features). The segments are not connected in any way, other than the reappearance of Big Jim Slade who is first shown as a man who can have sexual intercourse without premature ejaculation (slapsticky at best, the segment is titled "Sex Record"), and then later reappears in a hilarious and lengthy takeoff on "Enter the Dragon" with Evan Kim. A bit about the future of crude oil just feels blah, and the fake trailer (there are a few of those on hand) about Catholic girls in trouble features close-ups of breasts and some sexual thrusting in a shower and not much more. As I said, hit or miss.
I rewatch this movie once every few years and still find it despicable, that is despicably funny on occasion (though nowhere near the level of the ZAZ team's later spoofs). The best bits involve George Lazenby in an Irwin Allen-type disaster flick called "That's Armageddon" which is truly hysterical, and a final bit involving a Perry Mason send-up with a TV reporter narrating the proceedings. Sexual hijinks and sexual gags almost color the entire film, and the funniest involving such salaciousness has a couple who make out in front of the TV that's showing the news. The difference is that the TV anchorman and the crew are watching the couple having sex and they howl when she gets her orgasms!
Many might not find this movie funny (and some gags are so dated and a little racist that they will inspire nothing but reactions of silence) but I found a little less than 2/3 of it fairly humorous with a less than a 1/4 of it being infectiously funny. Oh, I liked seeing Henry Gibson but his fake commercial bit about keeping a dead child around for family activities is just gross. A commercial promoting a new headache reliever with Bill Bixby made me smile. The "Feel-Around" moviegoing experience was terrifically timed and made me laugh-out-loud with the experience of the movie delivered by an usher replicating the movie's scenes in 4-D! "Kentucky Fried Movie" will make you smile...and sometimes smile in disgust.
No comments:
Post a Comment