The Kentucky Fried Movie is the harrowing true-life story of the rise and fall and rise again of crispy fried chicken king, Colonel Harlan “Lick My Fingers” Sanders. It stars Chevy Chase as the Colonel, a demanding serious role that required him to become a racist, chicken loving redneck, and Kathleen Turner as the woman he loved and lost in his quest to take over the world with his secret blend of eleven herbs and poisons.
It’s a good film and I heartily recommend it. I give it two breasts and a wing up, with a side order of potato and gravy.
At least I would if this film really existed. It does sound compelling, doesn’t it?
The Kentucky Fried Movie is not actually about Colonel Sanders at all. It’s a movie made by the Kentucky Fried Theatre, a group formed by Jerry and David Zucker and Jim Abrahams. These names, well known for films such as Airplane (Flying High), Hotshots and Naked Gun, joined with John Landis and filmed a bunch of sketches that has since gained a late night television cult following.
| "The popcorn you’re eating has been pissed in – movie at eleven" |
Working within their “keeping flinging it, something will either stick or stink” method, the gags are not exactly working at an intellectual level, but there are plenty of laugh out loud moments that appeal to the idiot inside us.
Basically anything is fair game in their skits. Everything from film to oil production to the Kennedy assassination is treated to a Kentucky Fried Fricasseeing, with some hitting the mark with deadly accuracy, some missing by a slight margin and others sucking the big one.
The sketches bookend the main feature, a mini-movie sized parody of Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon, called A Fistful of Yen. This alone is worth the purchase price, me thinks, as it is a dead cert crack-up in nearly every respect and a spot on send up of the genre. I’m sure this was also some kind of inspiration for Steve Oderkerk to make his recent Kung Pow.
But this film isn’t going to be for everyone. It can be tasteless and offensive, a bit gratuitous with the women and, as I said previously, sometimes not funny at all. But more often than not it is a good laugh and also surprising with the number of celebrity cameos. Give it a go, there’s bound to be something in there that will tickle your stupid bone.
This is not always a pretty sight, but rarely the fault of the transfer process. Framed in the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio and 16:9 enhanced, it borrows from film and video to create the look, and it’s this source footage that can sometimes look a look bit average. Some of it was most likely intentional, such as in the case of the early segments lampooning morning news shows. These present the lowpoint in terms of detail and clarity, but from there it improves to slightly higher levels of detail, and a picture that isn’t great but easily viewable nonetheless.
Although this has been mixed into a Dolby Digital 2.0 surround format, there isn’t much call for anything other than the centre channel, which is no big deal seeing as how this was originally recorded in mono. In fact, I doubt any signal goes to the rear channel at all. I even put my ear right up against the drivers and turned the dial right up, all to no avail. The dynamic range is average without any really outstanding points worth highlighting, but then again no real issues either, and clarity is fine in respect to dialogue so you won’t miss a beat.
