Summary: Twenty years before the Farrelly Brothers turned raunch into acceptable film comedy, the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker exploited it first. The college threesome made it big with Airplane! in 1980, but this 1977 cinematic version of their live theater show is ground zero for their talents. Like The Groove Tube, Kentucky Fried Movie is a mishmash of sketches, fake commercials, and parodies with no central theme--except their crudeness and laugh-out-loud humor. Highlights include a commercial for "Scot Free," a board game based on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, "The Wonderful World of Sex," in which a couple goes through foreplay with a self- help narrator instructing them step by step, and a 20-minute spoof of Bruce Lee films entitled "A Fistful of Yen." Brazen to a fault, the movie will reach for any punch line, no matter how crude (and those who flocked to the film's initial release looking for R-rated sex will remember the final sketch and the infamous trailer for "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble.") Directed by then-unknown John Landis on a shoestring budget, the film has aged. But crassness, when it's this funny, is forever. --Doug Thomas
Kentucky Fried Movie
