The Kentucky Fried Movie consists of about two dozen short sketches organized around a prolonged parody of the Robert Clouse / Bruce Lee movie Enter the Dragon. While this sketch is the most elaborately sustained in the movie (and the most divisive for audiences who either responded wholly or considered it interminable), the overall movie does target a variety of subjects related almost exclusively to popular culture. Thus, it lampoons television formats (especially commercials, news and promotional programs as well as charities and such like), popular 1970s cinema genres (kung-fu movies, disaster movies and blaxploitation) and especially the art of the movie preview. In these, it finally emerges as a prolonged attack on the ways in which popular culture seeks to promote itself, and furthermore explores said culture’s hypocritical belief in itself as education as well as entertainment. This attack on the means of promotion provides a central thread running through most of the sketches, which otherwise seem a little like channel surfing. However, it is less an intellectual satire on said popular culture than a demonstration of the very absurdity of the acceptance of such a format. The notion of “guerilla comedy” thus amounts to a quick-fire succession of scenes in which familiar forms and situations are shot through with unexpected events and lines: it is hence as if popular culture is about to explode.
These provide for a contrast between familiarity and actuality, the film constantly veering into the unpredictability within the confines of the familiar. Therein lies the film’s sense of absurdity. However, Kentucky Fried Movie plays also as a parody of America’s infatuation with escapist popular culture as a means of infantile, instant gratification. As it is about the chaotic cacophony of contemporary media culture, it subjects the barrage of information that is modern America to sheer relentless mockery. Its humour of the unexpected beneath the everyday pushes a complacent and stagnant form to the point of absurdity and as such is closer to the approach carried on by Abrahams and the Zucker brothers in their subsequent films as director more than it is to Landis’s more structured work. Nevertheless, the film is a valuable demonstration of an approach to humour that would result in a major redefinition of film comedy in reaction to the works that followed this film. Whilst Kentucky Fried Movie is not as effective as such later comedies as Flying High (where the KFT troupe really came into their own as directors) it is nonetheless a pivotal film in the development of American comedy, cementing the careers of several of its most influential cinematic practitioners. It continues to have a loyal cult audience in the USA and would eventually spawn a belated sequel of sorts in 1988’s Amazon Women on the Moon. read more