Kentucky Fried Movie

The tag line “This movie is totally out of control!” is definitely justified with this classic sketch based film best known for its spoof of “Enter the Dragon”.

Billed as the first film in feelaround, the Kentucky Fried Movie is the film that launched the Zucker Abrahams Zucker team now famous for their spoof movies like Airplane and the Naked Gun films.

It started with a theatre based sketch review called the Kentucky Fried Theatre in the early 70s. Set up by brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams when they were students at the University of Wisconsin, they used video and film along side the stage performances to spoof commercials, TV shows and education films – all which feature in the Kentucky Fried Movie. The theatre was successful enough for the three of them to transfer it to a permanent home in LA.

They decided to expand on the theatre by making a short 10 minute film as a taster of a possible feature film version of the live shows. They found financial backing and got an upcoming director too – John Landis, who had only made one film so far, his King Kong-esque comedy “Schlock”. But his talent for comedy and knowledge of low budget filmmaking made him ideal for the Kentucky Fried Movie.

Although the sketch format wasn’t totally new (it had been already been done by “The Groove Tube”) the Kentucky Fried Movie stood out for many reasons. The celebrity cameos (Donald Sutherland, Bill Bixby, George Lazenby et al) were noticeable for such a low budget film. The quality of the spoofing was excellent, especially the Fistful of Yen segment which even went so far as to brilliantly spoof Lalo Schifrin’s score from “Enter the Dragon” and not just rely on slapstick gags – although the slapstick gags are also brilliantly executed too. And if one joke failed you wouldn’t really notice as the ‘quick fire’ script meant the ‘laughs per minute’ count was very high indeed.

It was made for around $650,000, which even in the 70’s was low budget. And with it using the sketch format you couldn’t reuse sets every day. Modern low budget classics like Reservoir Dogs and Clerks use their budgets well as the locations don’t really change. So to make a film where the script requires so many different locations, with such a low budget, is either stupid, requires skill or means you need to be very lucky. With the Kentucky Fried Movie, I think in fact it’s all three.

They even decided to play with the cinema going audience as proposed names included “Free Popcorn” and “Closed for remodelling”, obviously neither of which would please the cinemas when promoting the film on the hoardings outside.

Stand out sketches for me include Danger Seekers, Courtroom (using a great play on the word heinous), Fistful of Yen, Catholic High School Girls in Trouble, and The Wonderful World of Sex - where a couple uses an instructional record to enhance their sex life, which luckily also comes with Big Jim Slade in case of premature ejaculation (who amusingly has Heiveinu Shalom Aleichem as his theme tune). This sketch also introduced me to the art of non sequiturs, and the capital of  Nebraska is Lincoln.

For some reason this film has never had much of a life on TV, possibly as it features quite a lot of female nudity, but it has achieved cult status on video (from the early VHS vs Beta days through to DVD) mainly as it was the forerunner of the now over done spoof format.

The Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams have all gone on to make more than just spoof films, although they will always be associated with Airplane and the Naked Gun films, and John Landis as we know he went on to bigger things with classics like “The Blues Brothers”, “Animal House” and “An American Werewolf in London”. Landis also made “Amazon Women on the Moon” which kept with the sketch theme and is seen as a kind of follow up to the Kentucky Fried Movie, although the ZAZ guys didn’t work on it.

But the Kentucky Fried movie is more than just an insight into where these guys came from; it’s a great, funny look at America in the 70s. The TV, the educational films, the movies and so on. All superbly presented for our amusement in a classic that still stands up to this day as a very funny film indeed.

Interestingly I first remember noticing the film as a 6 or 7 year old when the poster, with it’s bizarre image of the Statue of Liberty and a sneaker, along with 3 black and white stills were displayed outside my local Odeon cinema. I didn’t know much about the film except the title didn’t make any sense as, in my world, ‘Kentucky Fried’ simply referred to food. But around the same time I also had a magazine from the cinema foyer which was promoting the films on release at the time, including the Kentucky Fried Movie. I still have this issue, which no longer has the Kentucky Fried Movie advert intact - I removed it once I’d seen the film on VHS as a teenager, and framed it for display in my bedroom.

So the poster image has always stayed with me to this day, literally in fact. You see many years later a friend was selling part of his poster collection to raise some cash and he had a Kentucky Fried Movie poster. I bought it from him and asked how he came by it. It seems his Aunt used to work at a cinema and gave him many of the posters from outside instead of throwing them away. And amazingly the cinema she worked at was the very same one where, as a child (possibly when queuing for Star Wars or maybe a Disney film) I first saw the poster, the very same poster that is now framed in my hallway.

So to me the Kentucky Fried Movie isn’t a lost film. I’ve always known about it and always had something to remind me of it. But as many people have asked me about it when they’ve seen my poster, I know it’s not as well known as I think it should be. So hopefully this article goes someway to help it be discovered all over again.