The Kentucky Fried Movie

The Kentucky Fried Movie is an American comedy film, released in 1977. It was directed by John Landis. The writers for the film were David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, the team who would later write and direct Airplane!, Top Secret!, and the Police Squad! television show and its movie spinoffs, The Naked Gun films. Four "stars" appear in the film: George Lazenby, Bill Bixby,Evan C. Kim and Donald Sutherland.

Description

The movie has no unified plot; rather, it consists of numerous sketches. The skits range from poking fun at karate movies to courtroom TV shows, and it also includes the semi-pornographic "Catholic School Girls In Trouble" skit. The movie features the talents of many former members of The Groundlings theater, as well as some from Second City.

The structure of the film is a parody of drive-in movie fare of the 1970s. Thus, its primary targets are exploitation films (such as the "Samuel L. Bronkowitz" who seems to be producer for all of the parody films), including early chop-socky movies such as Enter the Dragon (here parodied as "A Fistful of Yen" (in imitation of A Fistful of Dollars) and the longest and most sustained parody), women-in-prison movies and sex comedies (the "Catholic School Girls in Trouble," which contains women's breasts rubbing against clear shower doors and the apparently sexual use of cream-pie throwing), inane B-movie comedies, and disaster movies. Additionally, there are some segments making fun of television commercials from the 1970s, as well as public service announcements. The short movie parodies are presented as satires of the "Coming Attractions" trailers, and the sustained parodies represent the "feature" films.

The film had a production budget of a mere $65,000 which was extremely low even in 1977. The movie then had an additional $535,000 in print and advertising costs, bringing its total cost to about $600,000. The film would go on to gross about $20 million, making it one of the most financially lucrative films of the 1970's, as well as one of the most successful comedies of all time. In this sense, it was much like the Zucker Brother's and Abraham's later collaboration Airplane! (1980).

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