The Kentucky Fried Movie

Well, you have to start somewhere. This flick is where the Abrahams-Zucker team made its first foray into filmdom—and boy, did they experiment with everything under the comedic sun in this one. The result is highly uneven; there are gags that hit in a big way, while others either go on too long or totally miss the mark. But the entire soup is never boring. Plus you get to see lots of nudity, and many of the jokes are of highly questionable taste—always a good thing. Indeed, many of the bits are insensitive enough on various and sundry of today’s “cancellation” landscapes that you can get a certain twisted joy just from imagining the aneurysms the holier-than-thou types would have at most of this material. So it has that going for it, too. I wouldn’t say this is a great movie, or maybe even a good one in objective terms, but we wouldn’t have gotten Airplane or The Naked Gun without it, so perhaps we should grade on a curve. Sometimes, you crave that original recipe—and that’s what you get here.