The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1977
	Director: John Landis (The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London)
	Actors: Evan C. Kim, Bong Soo Han, Bill Bixby
	Country: USA
	Genre: Comedy
	Conditions of visioning: 02.02.2014, DVD, 42" TV, French dubbing.
Synopsis: A parodic and satirical  patchwork of the TV, cinema and advertisement world in the 70's USA.
Review: I like John Landis for some of his big movies (The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London) and some other work like Michael Jackson's Thriller music video or the episode of the Masters of Horror TV-series: Deer Woman. I even met him at the Neuchatel Festival Festival and he wrongly spelled my name on the autograph (see pictures below). I have read that at the time of The Kentucky Fried Movie he was young and inexperienced, and this small budget movie was a bit chaotic to film. This kind of reflection on TV and cinema reminds me a lot of Joe Dante's similar Hollywood Boulevard (1976), or his later and better Matinee (Panique sur Florida Beach in French) in 1993. The movie was written by the ZAZ (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker), responsible for the 80's parodies like Airplane, the Naked Gun series, ... and you can recognize the same kind of humour already here. The 30-minute parodic section of a Martial Art exploitation movie has probably influenced Kung Pow! (2002) and Black Dynamite (2009). Finally, I have learned that the movie was a great inspiration for the French humorists Les Nuls (particularly obvious when you hear the title song: The Karioka!). But apart from those great references, the movie is hard to watch: the jokes are not often funny, the absence of music makes the movie boring but hopefully the story changes often so that you are bored for only short periods of time. It was not helped by the poor French translation (I may give it a better rating once I watch it in original version). Recommended for big fans of cinema History only.
Rating: 3 /10