The writers who would go on to create comedy classics Airplane! and The Naked Gun, and for good measure the guy who would go on to direct Animal House, combine to bring us a movie not even remotely as funny as any of those other movies I just mentioned. The Kentucky Fried Movie is a mess, a sketch comedy in which the laughs are few and far between. Watching this is an exercise in tedium, never more so than during the "feature presentation" dropped into the middle of the movie, a 30-minute martial arts parody which is an interminable bore. The best you can say for the majority of the other sketches is at least they're mercifully brief, some only a few seconds long and none more than five or six minutes in length. So at least if you don't like what you're seeing at a given moment, and way more often than not you won't, you know there will be something entirely different coming right up soon enough. But then inevitably that next sketch starts and it's lousy too and on and on and on we go. Somebody make it stop please.
If you hold out any hope that the movie is ever going to gather any momentum at all the endless martial arts sequence kills that idea, bringing the movie to a dead stop. After that the movie crawls toward a merciful end. The last few sketches actually aren't half bad. There are some genuine laughs to be had there. But by that point you're so beaten down by all the miserable stuff you've been forced to sit through you can't fully appreciate it when you finally do see something funny. By the time you get to those last few sketches this movie has long since been doomed to failure. The writers threw a lot of garbage at the wall to see what would stick and very little did. About the best thing that can be said about this movie is that you're glad it exists because if it didn't there'd be no Airplane! But I'd watch Airplane! approximately 3,637 more times before I'd ever think of watching The Kentucky Fried Movie again.
If you hold out any hope that the movie is ever going to gather any momentum at all the endless martial arts sequence kills that idea, bringing the movie to a dead stop. After that the movie crawls toward a merciful end. The last few sketches actually aren't half bad. There are some genuine laughs to be had there. But by that point you're so beaten down by all the miserable stuff you've been forced to sit through you can't fully appreciate it when you finally do see something funny. By the time you get to those last few sketches this movie has long since been doomed to failure. The writers threw a lot of garbage at the wall to see what would stick and very little did. About the best thing that can be said about this movie is that you're glad it exists because if it didn't there'd be no Airplane! But I'd watch Airplane! approximately 3,637 more times before I'd ever think of watching The Kentucky Fried Movie again.