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| STAR RATINGS EXPLAINED |
| Unmissable |
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| Tragic |
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| FILM DETAILS | Certificate
18 | | Cast
Marilyn Joi
Saul Kahan
Marcy Goldman
David Zucker. | | Directors
John Landis. | | Screenwriters
David Zucker
Jim Abrahams
Jerry Zucker. | | Running Time
90 minutes |
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The Kentucky Fried Movie
Plot
A network of interconnecting skits modelled on the modern sprawl of American television. Thus we get spoof news programmes, spy films, mob films, kung fu epics, commercials, porn movies and a whole load of blaxploitation. Review
A rushed, puerile scattershot of sketches satirising American TV habits, that also manages that irritating trick of being occasionally funny too (in a scattershot and puerile way). Hence, The Kentucky Fried Movie, with its wobbly bosoms and un-PC hectoring, tends to feature heavily in pubescent boys rites-of-passage movies. Although John Landis directed it, the talents that emerged from its goonish, never-that-biting examination of American consumer foibles, are the writers, the two Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams, collectively ZAZ who went on to make one of the funniest films of all time in Airplane!. They were still warming up here. Their idea was to take the sketch comedy format, so successfully housed on television, and apply it to the movies, with the added postmodern gesture of making it about television. It’s a splurge of mock-ups from dippy kung-fu movie parodies (A Fistful Of Yen is the centre piece running to a whole half hour) to the exceedingly low-slung sexploitation of Catholic Schoolgirls In Trouble that manages the crafty trick of being both a spoof and a cheeky bit of soft-porn. The jokes hit as much as they miss, although ZAZ never have the energy or skill to truly fix on their target, it’s really just about schoolboy tittering. As mock oil company Argon declares in their public service segment, “We’re extracting 2.5 billion barrels of crude oil each day from teenagers’ faces.” They knew their target audience zits and all.
Verdict
Smart and satirical but very dated, obviously.
Reviewed by Ian Nathan
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| RE: Kentucky Fried Movie, The | | The popcorn you're eating has been pissed in... film at 11! ... More | | Posted by Cabal aka Boone at 19:20, 03 October 2006 | Report This Post | |
| | | RE: Kentucky Fried Movie, The | | There's little doubt that Airplane! is probably the funniest film ever made. Whilst The Big Lebowski has come close to topping this distinction with it's more zany and articulated brand of humour, the 600-odd gags in Airplane's short running time, including the best visual gag ever in Ted Striker's drinking problem, will likely never be bettered. Likewise, television's Police Squad, despite running for only six episodes and pre-cursor to the Frank Drebin Naked Gun trilogy, is perhaps the funnies... More | | | Posted by clownfoot at 21:00, 24 July 2006 | Report This Post | |
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