3483. The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

Starring: Bill Bixby, George Lazenby, Evan C. Kim

Director: John Landis

Running Time: 83 mins

The Kentucky Fried Movie is an American film featuring a collection of sketches, spoofing films, the news, and everything in between.

Feature-length sketch comedies are really hard to get right. Particularly when there isn’t a common thread between the different sketches, these films can go from sharp bursts of fun to dragging and boring at a moment’s notice, and that’s unfortunately exactly what happens to The Kentucky Fried Movie.

A perfectly harmless affair at first, the film delights with a series of short segments that poke fun at a variety of topics, but most of all deliver laughs with simply bizarre gags that make for great viewing early on.

However, it would be difficult to fill 83 minutes only with one or two-minute sketches, and so the film soon takes a tack towards much, much longer segments, most notably what seems like an entire movie’s worth of a Bruce Lee parody, spoofing Enter The Dragon.

And it’s there where the film really runs out of breath, going from a sharp, zippy and weird affair to one which has only one joke that it tries to drag out for as long as it can. And unfortunately, there is a point when just pretending to be Bruce Lee gets really rather boring.

As a result, The Kentucky Fried Movie starts to overstay its welcome, lacking the freshness that made the likes of And Now For Something Completely Different funny all the way through, and instead descending closer towards something resembling the horrors of Movie 43.

Now, The Kentucky Fried Movie is in no way as bad as Movie 43, and when it gets back towards shorter sketches later on, it’s a lot more enjoyable. However, it’s a film that shows itself to have relatively few ideas, and it grows stale rather quickly, which is why I’m giving it a 6.3 overall.