Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)
AV Channel DVD (region 4)
d. John Landis; pr. Robert K. Weiss; scr. David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams; ph. Robert E. Collins, Stephen M. Katz; ed. George Folsey Jr.; cast. Evan C. Kim, Bong Soo Han, Marilyn Joi, Robert Starr, George Lazenby, Donald Sutherland, Henry Gibson, Uschi Digard, Ingrid Wang (83 mins)
Sketch comedy has long been considered primarily a television mainstay, its episodic hit and miss succession of gags remarkable in that it usually carries no single unifying plot thread. Thus almost stream-of-consciousness comedic rambling, the connection between gags occurs at other levels: in subject matter, recurring actors, spill-over themes and in a broader social, political or cultural satire. The content in such sketch arrangements of course ranges in sophistication from the coarse and crude to the more intellectually subtle. Although sketch comedy has lengthy origins, it is rare that film has strictly appropriated this format, and although it has done so to profit and indeed to some positive critical responses, the results have always become cult films rather than truly enduring popular classics. The UK comedy troupe Monty Python, for instance, re-invented the sketch comedy for television in the 1970s with the hit show Monty Python’s Flying Circus and it was they who tried to transfer the format to film with And Now for Something Completely Different. The Pythons soon went in search of a more obvious unifying plot thread for subsequent film works, finding more acceptance. Although Monty Python are still well known, a similar but less regarded experiment with the sketch format on film occurred around the same time in the USA when members of the fringe Kentucky Fried Theatre funded their first movie.
The Kentucky Fried Theatre began its life in Madison, Wisconsin when University of Wisconsin students (and brothers) David and Jerry Zucker along with friend Jim Abrahams created a prototype multimedia show. Originally working from makeshift locations and for small audiences, their act consisted of short, improvised sketches interrupted by filmed or videotaped spoofs of mainly television commercials as well as educational movies and such like. The show proved successful enough that they moved to Los Angeles to set up the Theatre project fulltime. Over the subsequent five years, the Kentucky Fried Theatre went on develop a quite sizeable following, repeatedly playing to sell out shows. Their merciless, seemingly random attacks on popular culture would essentially take up the status of a fully-fledged comedic movement, making them pioneers of what David Zucker would later term “Guerilla Comedy”. In Los Angeles, the trio met producer Robert K. Weiss and director John Landis. Although the Theatre were itching to try film, having unsuccessfully tried to earlier sell the script for what would later become Flying High (or Airplane as it is known in the USA), it was Landis who suggested to them that they make a film that captured the integrity of the Kentucky Fried Theatre experience. They made a ten-minute preview to show the studios and so found backing, with Landis on board as director. read more