Review of The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) by Dougal S — 27 Jul 2012

The Kentucky Fried Movie can only be described as a bit of an oddity. This was the opening foray into cinema by the writing team of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (off of Airplane and The Naked Gun) and acts as something of an audition piece. The kernels of their anarchic humour are there but the film itself is a hit and miss affair.

Presumably influenced by Monty Python's big screen début '...And Now For Something Completely Different' the film makers opt to dispense with a standard film structure and instead present an extended series of spoofs and sketches ranging from thirty second shorts to a twenty minute mini-feature. Unfortunately this generates a lack of a 'style' for the film as they seem to have thrown every idea they had at the film and didn't take time to edit out the stuff that didn't really work. It also now has the added problem of losing something in translation as it is obviously packed with references to American TV shows and media personalities of the time which may have been hilarious on it's release but are now simply perplexing.

The positive side of the format is that if something isn't to your taste you only need to hang on for five minutes and something else will come along. The centre point of the film is the 20 odd minute 'Fistful of Yen' feature which is an extremely well observed spoof of the standard kung-fu flicks that were so popular at the time. Whilst it's very clever in it's observations, at times it becomes too well observed and forgets to be very funny, and with it's duration ends up outstaying it's welcome somewhat.

The real highlight of the film is 'The Courtroom' which is a simple spoof of a film-noir courtroom drama, but it's here that the wild style that ZAZ would adopt in their later films is most obvious. Sight gags and clever word play abound in the segment and it's a shame that more of the features were not scripted in the same vein.

The film is straight out of the seventies so the comedy is not subtle in places and there's a lot of smut and plenty of women get topless but it's never as outrageous as some reviewers (even today) seem to believe. It zips along at a pleasing pace and it'd be an understatement of immense proportions to say it's non-too-taxing. At best it's an interesting document of a group of film makers feeling their way in the movie business but it's worth a watch to pick out the gems that are wedged in every so often.