3 out of 5

Director: John Landis

Well, the ZAZ (Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker) film legacy starts here – Kentucky Fried Movie – a mashup of skits written by the team that are mostly parodies of different commercials and exploitation film genres. Every time I watch this I start out shaking my head and wondering how this congealed into the genius of Airplane! and Top Secret, but as the film goes on – once they toss in some longer skits, notably the kung fu parody – it comes together, and you start to see the combination of puns, weirdness, and sight gags they havent reached full culmination since the team split (sorry, Scary Movie 4). Whats interesting is that this is the most base of the ZAZ comedies – while all of their films dont avoid scatalogical humor or nudity, Kentucky Fried frequently parodies sexploitation, gratefully throwing boobs onto the screen. Along with some of the racial humor, its a kind of daring that, oddly, you just dont see anymore. The commentary on the DVD is worthwhile just because its nice when filmmakers actually enjoy watching their movie. Lastly, KFM proves that humor works best with context – while the rotating sketch formula is frequently hilarious (again, the sequencing plays a big part – its funnier once they allow for some longer sketches), the humor build-up is more successful when you have time to understand settings and characters. College kids should dig this and ZAZ fans obviously need to check it out to see the roots of the humor.