And a Fistful of Yen

The genre of parody works is broad and deep. You have movies playing in a genre, just to show the absurdity. You can have films specifically copying the story beats of another work. You can have comedy works trying to tell a real story while still resting its tongue firmly in its own cheek. Parodies can span a large body of work, from the greats of Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs (and it’s no mistake that all three of those are Mel Brooks films) to far weaker entries like Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie, and other “Movie” works from more recent cinema. Hell, from a certain perspective, the Deadpool films could also be considered parodies with how they love to skewer the very superhero genre they are a part of.

In 1980 a relatively unknown writer/director trio – Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, aka ZAZ – came out of nowhere to create one of the great parodies of all time: Airplane! Decades later that film still feels like a singular work, a parody built on the very bones of an already existing film, Zero Hour!, adding in wall-to-wall jokes that only serve to highlight just how very stupid the original film was. It works so well, with so many laughs coming at every moment, that it’s hard to sit straight faced through any scene of that movie. It launched ZAZ into the upper echelons of parody film and, no matter what they’ve made since, they will always be well regarded for that movie.

Everyone has to get their start somewhere, and before Airplane! ZAZ together wrote the parody sketch film The Kentucky Fried Movie. Released in 1977 and directed by John Landis (who up to that point only had one directing credit to his name, 1973’s Shlock), the film went on to make $7.1 Mil on a meager $650k budget, a rousing success considering it’s just such a deeply strange film. It plays less like a movie than an extra-long sketch comedy TV show. Audiences came out for it, though, not only because it was funny (which it is) but it also provided more sex and foul language than you could get on the sketch shows on TV (which there were a lot of at the time, including Saturday Night Live and SCTV). It was everything the comedians had wanted to make on broadcast TV, without the filter of the Standards and Practices. And it was a hit.

The film doesn’t really have a plot, per se. It opens with a few short and long sketches, from fake commercials to a fake newscast, along with some trailers for supposed upcoming films. The middle act of the movie, though, is set as the “Feature Presentation” and is entirely taken up with “A Fistful of Yen.” This sketch spans about a half an hour and is a parody of Enter the Dragon. It is largely a beat for beat remake of that Bruce Lee film, just with all the extraneous scenes and side characters cut out. Martial arts expert Loo (Evan C. Kim) is hired by the U.K.government to infiltrate the base of notorious villain Dr. Klahn (Han Bong-soo) to stop the evil-doer, and it goes over all the basic details of the Bruce Lee film.

From there, the film then switches back to a series of further sketches and trainers before another long segment takes over. This is “Courtroom”, a parody of the 1950s legal dramas. Filmed in black and white, to evoke the proper vibe, this sketch is much looser, and with far less plot, than “A Fistful of Yen”. Before the courtroom scene we’re told there was a car accident, someone is at fault, and it’s up to the jury to decide the plaintiffs innocence. Like a real TV show, this is even interrupted by further commercials before the segment wraps up, and then we get back to a few more fake commercials and a newscast before it all wraps up. In 87 minutes we’ve been taken on a tour through all the parts of TV surfing, just in a single movie.

The strength of The Kentucky Fried Movie is in its format. As it’s a series of parody sketches, the film moves at a brisk pace. Most sketches only take up a few minutes, no more than six, and then we move on to the next bit of material. Nothing lingers, and few bits rarely overstay their welcome. Even when the film does play a bit that goes on a little too long, you know that the film will quickly move on to the next segment, keeping everything moving without much fuss. Don’t like something in the film, just wait as something new will quickly come along.

At the same time, though, not all these segments work. I think the film is at its best when it does really quick, short jokes. Tiny segments, like the newscaster coming on to say something absurd followed by, “film at 11,” is great. The fake trailers for other movies, such as “Catholic School Girls in Trouble” and “Cleopatra Schwartz” aren’t necessarily loaded with great jokes, but at just a couple of minutes each they also get their point across before quickly moving on. They work as they’re fast and effective.

At the other end of the scale is “A Fistful of Yen”, which goes on way too long. By the time this film had come out, Enter the Dragon had been out for four years and had built up quite a following. A parody of that film was amusing at the time, I’m sure, but now, several decades later, it feels dated and silly. The accent the main character puts on feels racist, the fighting is lackluster, and there’s very little point to the whole sketch. Hell, it even felt like the writers didn’t know how to end the bit since it quickly switches from a martial arts parody into a riff on The Wizard of Oz. That felt jarring and less funny than it should have been. At half an hour long. this sketch just goes on for too little substance, and, by about 15 minutes in, it feels more like padding than a real sketch.

I think “A Fistful of Yen” also clearly shows the age of this movie. When it came out an Enter the Dragon parody was fresh and interesting. Since then, though, there have been so many knock-off Bruce Lee film, so many parodies of martial arts movies, and so many other films that riffed on Enter the Dragon that “A Fistful of Yen” no longer has its punch. When you couple this with the fact that I doubt a lot of people growing up now have even seen that Bruce Lee film, you’re entering a point where the parody itself no longer resonates with audiences.

I think that actually applies to a lot of the material in this film at this point. It’s clearly designed to play off the idea of couch surfing, moving through all the genres of television programming that were on in the 1970s. Most of that material no longer exists, though, on the modern television landscape. Sex comedies, Blacksploitation, and Hong Kong martial arts exploitation films aren’t the popular genres they once were. News programs now don’t look like they did back then. Most commercials have changed in style and tone. Hell, the “Willer Beer” segment is a long riff on Hare Krishnas, and you never see those guys around anymore. Very little in this film would resonate with audiences anymore.

It’s not that films can’t age over time, but you do also have to take into account how a film will work when it moves beyond the year it was filmed. Airplane! works because even when you’re four decades beyond the time of its release, most of its parodies are timeless. They’re jokes and riffs on material in a script, not playing off pop culture of the moment. It’s the same reason why Airplane II: The Sequel crashed and burned: it didn’t have anything to say beyond pop-culture references and winks at the camera. You can only get so far when your material has a shelf life.

The Kentucky Fried Movie was amusing at the time, and maybe even uproariously so. I can’t deny that I chuckled a few times during the film, finding all of it a bit dated but otherwise feeling like it was a mildly fun, breezy time. But bear in mind I have spent a lot of time going back and watching films of previous eras so I can understand and enjoy works as they’ve evolved over decades. Your average person, now, isn’t going to know or care about most of the riffs in this film, and I doubt they’d find it amusing at all. In a certain time, and a certain place, this film was a hit. We no longer live in that time, and it shows.