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The Kentucky Fried Movie

The Kentucky Fried Movie

List Price: $14.98
Your Price: $11.24
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: So good I bought the movie
Review: Years ago I saw this movie 5 times in one week at Loews. When I saw it was out on video I just had to get a copy. All the old jokes came back to me. It was strange to see some of the current stars before they were big stars.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: freakin funny
Review: Kentucky Fried Movie is a great classic, but the first time I saw it was a long time ago. Now that I see it again it isn't that good. Sure it has it's good points if you want to know what they are you haven't seen the movie, and should. All in all I would have to rate this fairly low on my top 15 favorite movies of all time.

Ps. Buy it on VHS the DVD doesn't have enough extras to make it worth buying that way.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE
Review: THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE is a feature length assembly of sketches that make fun of TV commercials, educational films, kung-fu movies, adult films, disaster films, and much more. This film came out back in the 70's and is probably one of the first movies ever to produce raunchy humor and sight gags in order to get the audience to laugh out loud. Some personal favorite bits of mine include; "A Fistful of Yen," "Catholic High School Girls In Trouble," "That's Armageddon," "The United Appeal For The Dead," and "Headache Clinic." If you are a fan of raunchy comedy, gross out humor, or parodies --- then you should pick up THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE right now!!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Movie that Made me almost injure myself
Review: This movie without the shadow of a doubt is one of the greatest comedies of all time (well...to me anyway) The gags are to die for and the parodies are too hilarious! When I first saw this I was laughing so hard I almost pulled one of my muscles. The split second news info is great. I was laughing till my face was rad as a beet! You have to get this movie if you like airplane...Grab this one!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Fleeting But Stunning Glimpse Of Uschi Digart
Review: A perennial midnight movie staple in and around my hometown of Dearborn, MI, "Kentucky Fried Movie" is comprised of a series of sketches satirizing everything from sexploitation ("Catholic High School Girls In Trouble" - featuring the incredible Uschi Digart) to kung fu movies ("A Fistful Of Yen" - with an obvious but hilarious dig at Detroit). Along with "The Groove Tube," KFM apparently inspired both "Saturday Night Live" and, some 20 years later, "Amazon Women On The Moon." Mindless fun and a fascinating look at 70's culture.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Where it all began!
Review: I bought this VHS about 12 years ago (it was the first movie I ever bought) when I was about 13 years old just because it had a cool cover and it was in the bargain bin. I didn't know it at the time, but this would become one of my favorite movies of all time. I watched that tape so many times that video quality was degrading, and the audio was crackled out in many places. This is a hilarious movie of epic proportions. I recently picked up the DVD, and the upgrade is well worth it. The video is completely cleaned up, and the audio is crystal clear. Plus the extra features on the DVD are great, the audio commentary by David Zucker and the rest of the crew is almost as funny as the movie itself! If you like movies like Naked Gun, Airplane!, and the like, get this DVD. It started it all.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: I'm Building An Army of Immense Magnitude
Review: From the guys who brought you the hilarious "Airplane" and the unintentionally funny "Ghost" and "First Knight" and John Landis, director of "Animal House" and "Blues Brothers," this is one hilarious movie. It's crude, it's sloppy, it's rude and wildly inconsistent, but when it's rolling it will actually injure you with laughter.

"KFM" is the evil mutant lovechild of Mad Magazine and the underground video movement that also spawned the original "Saturday Night Live." It features parodies of everything from commercials to those incredibly boring films your teachers made you watch in class when they felt too downtrodden by their crappy pay to actually make a lesson plan. The film's centerpiece is a pitch-perfect Bruce Lee/"Enter the Dragon" parody called "A Fistful of Yen" that devolves into a "Wizard of Oz" parody.

Features no budget, no stars (although Donald Sutherland makes a non sequitor cameo) and about 5 million laughs. Buy it, rent it, own it, live it. Dare to dream it.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Rude, Crude, Silly, Dated and Very Funny !!!
Review: In 1972, David and Jerry Zucker along with their old friend Jim Abrahams (Airplane, Naked Gun, Etc.)moved from Madison Wisconsin to Los Angeles. They had actually made a few dollars in Madison performing some skits and improvisations out of the back of a bookstore for appreciative mostly college aged audiences. Once in Los Angeles they rented a former half-way house on Pico Blvd (in L.A.). They lived upstairs and worked downstairs. The building was first known simply as the White House. Word spread that there were some crazy people doing crazy comedy shows on Pico Blvd. at the White House. There were soon ads running in local newspapers THE NOSE is running Thursday through Sunday at The Kentucky Fried Theater on Pico.

The ZAZ team also earned money by producing and directing training and education films. They made some for the L.A.P.D.'s (Police Department) Parker center and some on fork lift safety. People like Pat Proft (writer of Police Academy, Mr. Magoo, High School High, etc), and John Landis, (who had made a low budget film in San Francisco called Schlock), soon joined the ZAZ team.

They had decided to try and get a movie financed. They wrote a script and proceeded to get turned down by every studio in town. Then they started with meeting with potential investors, successful Realtors and dentists. This was not successful but it did give them the idea to pool money together, borrow some from their parents and shoot part of the film,( four sketches were made-- Scott Free, and Zinc Oxide among them). Armed with the filmed sketches ZAZ and Landis were able to get get a budget and distribution deal for their movie.

Kentucky Fried Movie is a series of crude and usually raunchy sketches which parody commercials, exploitation, blaxploitation, and kung fu movies, News programs, T.V. Courtroom reality shows, and educational films.

The pace of the film and the jokes are much slower than the Airplane and Naked Gun films. The film is dated and the small budget they worked with means parts of the film look like it was shot for public access television. A lot of the humor is sexist, racist, crude, rude, dumb and sophomoric and only about half the jokes ever worked. There's also quite a bit of nudity in the film.

If you're like me and find long, well done parodies of Enter the Dragon funny (even if the jokes are pretty obvious and a bit stale), you are going to enjoy yourself. If long coming attraction parodies for films with titles like Catholic School Girls in Trouble and Cleopatra Schwartz (in which a Pam Grier like Amazon black woman teams with a Hasidic Rabbi to fight criminals) sound funny to you-you'll have a great time with Kentucky Fried Movie. The news-cast sequences have been done much better, and go on for way too long, (ending with Rick Baker in a great looking monkey seat destroying the news set). The satire of courtroom reality shows is still funny as just about every court-room cliche is acted out with terrible puns while Tony Dow as Wally and Jerry Zucker as the Beaver, observe. The satire of 70's era disaster films called "That's Armageddon" (featuring a quick glance of Donald Sutherland) is even funnier if you get the joke about George Lazenby. Bill Bixby shows up quickly giving us a tour of a headache research center. There's a satire of the film gimmick Sensurround, rendered in a bit that was part of their stage show called Feel-around. Some of the cleverest bits in the film include the commercial for the Kennedy conspiracy theory board game Scott Free and the very funny educational film satire called Zinc Oxide and You. Outside of Scott Free, the film stays away from political humor. While some of these exact same topics were parodied in 1974's Groove Tube, Kentucky Fried Movie is still pretty funny. And surprisingly (especially for the era it was made in), there is no drug humor in the film.

Kentucky Fried Movie is sometimes credited with inspiring or having influence on Saturday Night Live. Kentucky Fried Movie is also sometimes credited for pioneering the grab bag format of satirizing commercial, coming attractions, t.v. shows and movies. Nothing could be further from the truth. Saturday Night Live began in 1976. This film was released in 1977 and though e four sketches of it were filmed in 1976, few had seen them.. Besides... the cast of SNL came out of one of the most popular and most successful examples of improv comedy theater: Second City. Both the original Chicago and Toronto groups were where the majority of the SNL cast came from. Lorraine Newman was from the Los Angeles improv group The Groundlings which is where talent like Pee Wee Herman, Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz and Elvira also began their careers. Toronto's Second City also gave birth to the excellent long running SCTV television show which began (I believe) in approximately 1977 (John Candy, Harold Ramis, Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis etc are from here).

The first successful, widely distributed film that featured raunchy humor, parodies of t.v. shows and commercials was Ken Shapiro's 1974 cult comedy hit The Groove Tube (1974). It was certainly this film and perhaps Neal Isreal's Tunnelvision (1976), which gave ZAZ the idea to create their own. The success of Kentucky Fried Movie catapulted the careers of Landis and ZAZ. Landis got Animal House and ZAZ eventually would release 1980's Airplane.

The recently released DVD features ZAZ, Landis and producer Robert K. Weiss on the commentary track. Unfortunately its one of the lamest commentary tracks I've ever heard. All five of them are in a room together, and groan and laugh at various parts of the film, share some inside jokes and tell us very little about the making of the film. It's hard to tell who's talking and often they all try to talk at the same time. There is however some interesting 8 m.m. home movies that the Zucker's took on the set of the movie as it was being made which is part of the DVD disc. These were sent to the parents to prove they were really making a movie in Hollywood!. They show people working pretty hard to create the zaniness which would become the film.

What's most important however is that for a lot of us, Kentucky Fried Movie remains pretty darn funny.

And remember:

"I'm not wearing any pants! Film at 11."

Chris Jarmick Author of The Glass Cocoon with Serena F. Holder - A steamy cyber thriller...

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Laugh till it hurts!
Review: This is a film I first saw while drunk at a party, and even sober, it is funny as hell! Anyone familiar with 70's commercials will especially like the various spoofs! If you want to just spend an hour or so rolling in laughter, this is the film for you. Grab a bucket of chicken and enjoy! (Just make sure it wasn't fried in the "Nesson" oil!)

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The perfect midnight movie
Review: When people think of midnight movies, many may come to mind, but a few stand out. Kentucky Fried Movie is one of the few at the top of this short-lived era, where more explicit or more artistic films could be shown in the wee hours.

Its still quite hilarious on its own. There are some outrageous, vulgar-but-funny takeoffs. It is, however, quite dated. Some of the sketches fall flat. For most, really, the film will be a mixed bag - the chapter skip function is a welcome feature here. The film's most famous sketches ("Catholic High School Girls In Trouble", "Fistfull of Yen" among them) are incredible, though, and will leave your sides splitting.

Its the perfect movie to recreate the TRUE midnight movie experience with. Watch it with a group late at night. Throw back a few beers (or other mind-altering substances of choice). Put on KFM. Laugh yourself silly. Takes you back, doesn't it? :)

One other note: I found the DVD commentary, although not too insightful, incredibly amusing - worth the DVD price on its own.


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