p e n g u i n d e v i l

It was one of those early morning moments. Up with the baby but too tired to do anything but couch it. Those mornings when you watch the movies that are normally too much of too little to keep your attention. This time around it was Kentucky Fried Movie. Always a breezy watch, being short silly and plotless. The precursor to the more entertaining Amazon Women on the Moon. This is the first Abraham/Zucker/Zucker movie, coming three years before the much superior Airplane!… And it shows. Very low-budget feeling, and rather haphazardly thrown together, it is nonetheless a fun movie with a good heart where you feel that everyone was in it just for the fun. A satire on television viewing, it feels like school project in many ways, or a blend of old Mad magazine and National Lampoon. Made up of a series of skits that is unabashedly dumb, juvenile and pre-PC, Kentucky Fried Movie takes the form of channel surfing as you move around from commercials to TV shows to late-night movies.

There is a feature presentation in the middle, a fairly dull Spy/Kung-Fu movie called Fistful of Yen wherein a Kung-Fu master is hired by the government to infiltrate a crime lord’s fortress in the mountains. While the Kung-Fu is fairly entertaining, the piece didn’t grab my attention. And it is all presented in one piece, unlike the feature presentation in Amazon Women, whose broken up viewing I preferred. But then I preferred that sci-fi feature better anyway.

The commercials that are thrown in are pretty dumb, covering topics like zinc oxide, headache medicine, lingering odors and love making, though they can be entertaining… Especially the zinc oxide informational piece, I never knew how much I needed it! Then, there are the newscasts. The movie is heavily laced with these which, while they are innocuous enough, are also unfunny. This movie does certainly show its age with the humor. But the two-way newscast at the end of the film, one of its trademark scenes, is pretty funny and clever.

As with real life, the movie previews can be the best part. There are a good number of them interspersed here, and they can be fairly extensive. I do enjoy seeing the satirical and contemporary take on some of the film genres of the 1970’s. Especially the reference to “Earthquake” which I remember hearing in the theater below me once at the Broadway Theater. Here we are given teasers for: the ultimate disaster movie, “That’s Armageddon” (featuring George Lazenby), the undeniably risque teen sexploitation number “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble” (hide your eyes),

and the gritty crime exploitation drama “Cleopatra Schwartz” (featuring: machine guns, lots of violence, tough streets and the titular heroine [ala, Pam Grier] who marries a Hasidim and forms a crime-fighting couple).

In addition to all of these goodies, there are also some surprising actor appearances: the irreplaceable sexploitation queen Uschi Digart (billed this time around as Ursula Digart) in a rather excessive shower scene (in, of course, Catholic High School Girls in Trouble, which I had a capture of here, but I pulled it in a lingering moment of propriety), Bill Bixby (no, I did not watch this because of the Hulk movie) doing a celebrity commercial plug, and Donald Sutherland as the clumsy waiter in That’s Armageddon.

All in all, it is a silly, harmless and risque satire on TV of the 70’s which, while it is silly and cheap, is a pretty fun watch. One of these days, I’d like to watch it back to back with Amazon Women…