Kentucky Fried Movie
Amazon.co.uk Review
Twenty years before the Farrelly Brothers turned raunch into acceptable film comedy, the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker exploited it first. The college threesome made it big with Airplane in 1980, but this 1977 cinematic version of their live theatre show was the ground zero for their talents. Kentucky Fried Movie is a mish-mash of sketches, fake commercials, and parodies with no central theme–except their crudeness and laugh-out-loud humour. Highlights include a commercial for “Scot Free”, a board game based on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy; “The Wonderful World of Sex”, in which a couple goes through foreplay with a self-help narrator instructing them step-by-step; and a 20-minute spoof of Bruce Lee films entitled “A Fistful of Yen”. Brazen to a fault, the movie will reach for any punchline, no matter how crude (and those who flocked to the film’s initial release looking for R-rated sex will remember the final sketch and the infamous trailer for “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble”.) Directed by then-unknown John Landis (who went on to make The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London) on a shoestring budget, the film has aged. But crassness, when this funny, is forever. –Doug Thomas, Amazon.com