The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

★★½
The Kentucky Fried Movie is the first effort by the ZAZ team, which consisted of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker. Throughout the '80s and into the early '90s, these men wrote and directed some of the funniest movies ever made. Though they didn’t develop the idea of the cinematic parody, they used it frequently as the method to deliver their jokes. They would pick genres or current events and apply a humorous spin on them. This approach resulted in their best work, Top Secret! and The Naked Gun.

Before rising to fame, the Zucker brothers and Abrahams created the Kentucky Fried Theater, in which they performed live comedy skits in their home state of Wisconsin. When they moved their operations to California, they wanted to turn some of their better skits into a movie. Then-unknown John Landis received the directorial duties, and with very little money in the bank, the foursome set out to film a series of sketches in the style of a Saturday Night Live episode.

While watching The Kentucky Fried Movie, we can plainly see the budding comedic gifts of the filmmakers coming to light. John Landis would go on to direct Animal House and Trading Places, while the ZAZ team followed up this effort with Airplane!. Having not fully refined their gifts at this point in their careers, Landis and company did not make a completely successful picture. It's wildly uneven and features skits that don't work at all.

The skits range from sneak previews, public service announcements, commercials and news broadcasts. Lumped in the middle is a short film parody called "A Fistful of Yen," which lampoons Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. It stars Evan Kim as a lisping martial arts expert named Loo. The C.I.A. sends him to an island fortress to rescue a scientist and defeat warlord Dr. Khlan (Bong Soo Han). There's some definite ZAZ humor in this segment, most evident when the scientist enters Loo's chamber and points out the hidden listening devices. Each one she points out becomes bigger and more obvious than the last, culminating with Loo speaking directly into a boom mike.

Other successful skits include the hilarious "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble," featuring a Marilyn Chambers look-alike named Linda Chambers and a dwarfish clown whipping three chained teenage girls. "Zinc Oxide and You" promotes the valuable uses of the chemical compound by having objects disappear in a woman's kitchen, which causes all sorts of havoc. "Danger Seekers" is short, but its punch line is unexpected and hilarious. In two other skits, a muscular character named Big Jim Slade makes a sudden entrance to pose for the camera and perform heroic deeds.

The amount of failed skits far outnumbers the good ones, and that's the reason for the movie's mediocre standing. Two movie trailers, one for Cleopatra Schwartz and another for That's Armageddon!, feature people acting silly, but there's really no joke to be told here. One segment shows two commentators discussing various topics while the boom mike hits them in the face. A board gamed called Scot-free makes fun of Monopoly, but all the voiceover does is describe the rules, which are unusual but hardly humorous. Jerry Zucker plays a man who took a powerful headache medicine but can't wake up the next morning because it causes intense drowsiness.

Even though it's not consistently good, The Kentucky Fried Movie has its moments. The ZAZ team is broken apart now, and John Landis is in a slump, but their respective bodies of work since this movie represent high points in movie comedy.

© 2005 Silver Screen Reviews