Product Description

From the director of Animal House and the creators of Airplane and The Naked Gun comes the original madcap, most out-of-control spoof of all time. The one that started it all!! The Kentucky Fried Movie!

Featuring a cast of more than a few but less than a lot, this insane collection of comedy skits includes such now famous sketches as the Kung-Fu parody, "A Fistful of Yen", and the legendary "Catholic School Girls in Trouble." Enjoy the future of moviegoing with the "Feel-A-Round" theater experience. See notable and highly respected actor Donald Sutherland as the clumsiest waiter in motion picutre history. Watch such characters as Cleopatra Schwartz and Big Jim Slade tickle your funny bone until it has to be removed surgically!

Directed by John Landis and written by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, and featuring appearances by ex-James Bond George Lazenby and The Incredible Hulk star Bill Bixby, The Kentucky Fried Movie is the cult classic you've been waiting for! It's a virtual guarantee (not an actual guarantee) that you will not find another film iwth as many side- splitting moments of pure unadulterated hilarity as The Kentucky Fried Movie.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10379 in DVD
• Brand: Anchor
• Released on: 2000-06-20
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, Full Screen, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 83 minutes

Amazon.com
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

DVD features
This DVD offers a surprising amount of information for such a little film. More than 18 minutes of home movies shot on-set and more than 100 black-and-white pictures are included in addition to the audio commentary. Director Landis, Abrahams, the Zucker brothers, and producer Robert Weiss ruminate over the picture, admitting they haven't seen it in 20 years; a lot of the talk is asking who the various actors are and if they were still alive. More informative is the history of the Kentucky Fried Theater, how the fivesome raised money for the film, Landis's remarks on why the film would now be rated NC-17, the revelation that David Letterman auditioned, and how they lucked out in finding the lead for "A Fistful of Yen." The DVD chapter stops make it easy to find a favorite segment. Did we mention "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble"? --Doug Thomas

Customer Reviews

Uneven, but hilarious
Ah... there's nothing quite like sitting back and spending an afternoon watching a series of sophomoric jokes, uproarious site gags, and ample naked breasts to make just make the time fly by. The team of Zucker/Abrahms(sp?), that wacky team that done brung (poor grammar is intentional here) you great films like "Airplane" first cut their teeth on a sketch comedy forum they called "The Kentucky Fried Theater". By having the audacity to go places that Saturday Night Live and their censors could only dream about, the Brothers Zucker and Jim Abrahms were able to create raunchy, racy, and hilarious sketchy comedy. In the late 1970's they finally made the big leap and took their `talents' the big screen with the cult hit "The Kentucky Fried Movie".

"...Movie" is a somewhat uneven compilation of sketch comedy that is crafted in the Monty Python mold. Don't let the uneven aspect deter you, though. When "Kentucky Fried Movie" hits its targets, it makes for some of the funniest and most titillating comedy on film. One of the raunchiest skits is a `promo' for an upcoming movie called "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble". The shameless display of naked females, graphic (but, humorous) sex, and crude humor make this sketch one of the all-time classics. Even people who have never seen "The Kentucky Fried Movie" know about this famous sketch. There are some other fairly inspired bits in this film, including another extremely raunchy skit called "Eyewitness News (Nudes?)" where a young couple gets quite amorous while watching the evening news. "Cleopatra Schwartz" which pairs a Hassidic rabbi with a Pam Grier-type as a crime fighting couple seems just plain wrong, but is just plain funny. Other skits like the `Feel-O-Rama' movie theater and `Big Jim Slade's love record' are quite funny.

However, the true crown jewel of this movie is an inspired spoof of the old Bruce Lee movies called "Fistful of Yen". By far the longest sketch, it also packs the most comedic punch per square inch. The Bruce Lee type character must break into an evil criminal mastermind's palace and rescue a damsel in distress. This mastermind has a secret weapon, a prosthetic arm that looks like it was made by Snap-On Tools. Nothing is spared in this set. Shots are taken ridiculously sexual names that are given to Asian characters in these movies; the easy duping of an `expert' bodyguard is spoofed; and, even Detroit is spared no punches. For me, the most hilarious aspect is the criminal mastermind's palace `alarm system'. When you see it, you will know what I mean. This one sketch, alone, makes the movie worthwhile. The shameless amount of raunchiness doesn't hurt, either. If you're curious about how the deranged minds that created "Airplane" got their start, or just enjoy a good film that seems to have been the inspiration for every sex comedy to come along since, then "The Kentucky Fried Movie" will be time well spent.

Dated But Very Very Funny
This midnight movie staple is a great example of (dirty) skit comedy. Another in the great line of quotable movies, there are some skits that are extraoridinarily funny. The "Fist Full of Yen" is so good you will find that you will want to build a Martial Arts Army of Extra-Ordinary Magnitude.

Some of the humor is not for everybody, as it is very sexually explicit. There is a great deal of nudity, so it is definitely not appropriate for the kiddies. But if you find early Saturday Night Live or Monty Python funny, you will definitely get a kick out of this picture. You will certainly never see the Evening News the same again. There are parts of this movie that do not hold up to time and some of the humor falls flat, but most of the skits are timeless and the slow parts are few and far between. Plus, the 70's wardrobe and music are funny, in and of itself.

People from Big Jim Slade the former tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs to all the Catholic High School Girls in Trouble recommend this movie, and so do I. It is very funny.

A Movie of Extraordinary Magnitude
Wildly unevenly funny spoof of movies and TV from the team of John Landis and Zucker-Abrams-Zucker, who went on to do Airplane and the Naked Gun franchises.

KFM is notable for its crass humor, celebrity cameos and several unrelated bits. Most of the bits are short and some aren't very funny anymore (Bill Bixby's Headache Clinic and Henry Gibson's United Appeal for the Dead are notable in the aspect, although it is great to see the former "alive again"). Working better are the movie spoofs from "Samuel L. Bronkowitz". The classic is "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble", with its gratuitous nudity and inane jokes. "That's Armageddon" (with Donald Suterhland as the clumsy waiter" )is a great parody of and would probably be better than the future movie of a similar title. ZAZ also use the Bronkowitz name in their later movies.

The centerpiece of the movie is Evan Kim in "A Fistful of Yen", which is part Kung Fu Movie, part adventure movie and part Wizard of Oz (this begins with Dr. Klon melting a la the Wicked Witch of the West and ends with Kim as Dorothy, complete with Auntie Em, Toto, and a very familiar figure from Klon's Mountain.) This sketch comes complete with the evil villain ( Klon, who has a number of attachments such as a hair dryer to an artifical hand), a damsel in distress (Anna) and Kim as the hero. Of course, Kim gets to use his kung fu skills to kill about 50 or 60 men. Pay attention to the end, when Kim returns to Kansas. Some of his dialgoue finds its way into the credits of a future ZAZ movie. Also used in in the future Airplane is the basketball bit, only this time it is martial arts fighters playing basketball instead of aborigines.)

Another longer form sketch is "Courtroom" a black and white parody of the 1950's court shows (and better than the ones on TV today). This is replete with Tony Dow and Jerry Zucker as Wally and Beaver Cleaver, a morph into "What's My Line", and Steven Stucker as a gay court reporter, a role he would revise twice in the Airplane films. Colin Male, who was the reporter on the old Divorce Court, appears as the reporter in this spoof. Incidentally, Male's character is named "Steven McCrosky", a name that ZAZ would later use in Airplane. Also used again in Airplane is the character named "Rex Kramer".

Paying their usual homage to sports, the two opposing attorneys in Courtroom are named "Hornug" and "Taylor". No doubt inspired by Green Bay Packers greats Paul Hornug and Jim Taylor.

Some of the other bits include "Eyewitness News" where a news team watches a couple having sex, a spoof of the Today show (with Academy Award winning makeup artist Rick Baker as a gorilla) and a science film showing that zinc oxide is in everything.

ZAZ and Landis were just warming up for their future endeavors and while KFM is very uneven, it gives us a glimpse of the genius that was yet to come.