The Kentucky Fried Movie

The Kentucky Fried Movie is amateurish, corny, crude, crass, and tasteless. It has something to offend everyone. You will laugh anyway. You will laugh so hard you may need to wipe your eyes to see the screen.

The film is a series of loosely connected skits, and I will not describe them because doing so would steal their punchlines, which is all they have. The writers are Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, who would later make Airplane! and the Naked Gun series. The director is John Landis, who would go on to Animal House. You can see the seeds here, planted in very cheap soil.

The centerpiece is “A Fistful of Yen,” an extended spoof of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. Evan C. Kim plays “Loo,” and he is very funny. This works best if you know the original, because the parody doesn’t just exaggerate the iconic moments. It targets the things you weren’t supposed to notice. In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee conducts a nighttime reconnaissance mission with improbable stealth. Here, Kim knocks over furniture while a guard patrols three feet away. Lee slips a cobra into a guardroom and one of the guards leaps through a window; Kim sends in a toy robot and elicits the same result. This is parody at its best, the kind Mel Brooks achieved with Young Frankenstein, good-natured ribbing that loves its source material enough to notice where it cheats. The budget here wouldn’t cover Brooks’s catering, but the wit is comparable.

The remaining skits are uneven, which is the nature of sketch comedy, but the hit rate is surprisingly high. The best ones are the most outrageous. “Danger Seekers” and the “United Appeal for the Dead” go so far past offensive they lap decency and come back around to something almost innocent. You may be ashamed of how hard you laugh. There are also fake trailers from the prolific producer Samuel L. Bronkowitz, including “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble,” which parodies exploitation pictures, and “That’s Armageddon!,” which parodies disaster films and practically serves as an audition reel for Airplane!.

At 83 minutes, the movie is over before the formula wears thin. This isn’t Naked Gun good. That film added Leslie Nielsen’s blissful obliviousness—a deadpan layer that gave the sight gags and pratfalls something to play against. But it’s close enough. If you liked Airplane! or The Naked Gun you’ll find plenty to enjoy here.

Unless you’re easily offended. Then you should stay far, far away.