Max’s Drive-In Movie – Kentucky Fried Movie

Kentucky Fried Movie Header

The reason I thought about this movie again was I was reading a Quentin Tarantino interview and he mentioned how much he liked it. It is in his favorite movie list. I hadn’t seen it since around 2012 or so. I rewatched it and enjoyed it a lot.

I read about this movie a lot and finally got to see it in the 1980s. It’s close to a rated R Saturday Night Live episode set in a movie with no audience. They have fake newscasts, commercials, movie trailers (Catholic High School Girls In Trouble), and almost everything else. It’s 1970s skit humor very close to SNL with the first cast. Some skits work really well and some skits don’t…just like most skit-based shows. I also would compare some of the humor with Airplane! and Naked Gun. This movie does include nudity and dark humor.

The film was directed by John Landis and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (who later created The Naked Gun series). You will see familiar faces but not well-known except for a few cameos by Donald Sutherland, Bill Bixby, and George Lazenby. Tony Dow also makes a cameo playing his old character Wally Cleaver in the skit Courtroom.

The Zucker brothers (David and Jerry) and Jim Abrahams were the creative team behind the film. They had originally been performing a live comedy show called “The Kentucky Fried Theater” in Madison, Wisconsin, in the early 1970s. The success of their live sketches inspired them to translate that format into a film. This was going on across the nation along with the National Lampoon Magazine which inspired a different kind of skit comedy than the Carol Burnett Show.

I really hate the word “dated.” This goes back to a modern movie critic saying “Vanishing Point” was dated. Hmmm, a movie set and filmed in the 1970s with a 1970s theme and style…who would have thought that? When you watch a movie like this one…you have to put yourself in that mindset of when it was made. I understand that some comedy styles change but some things are funny…and some are not… regardless of when they were made. In other words, it’s not “politically correct.”

I have seen some “first reaction” videos of this movie from young people who were watching it for the first time. They were very positive which surprised me. Of course, they gave warnings because of the darkness but liked it.

The budget was $600,000 and it made 7.1 million dollars at Drive-Ins across America. I won’t include a plot since it contains different skits.

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, Alternative music, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player. Not the slightest bit interested in politics at all.

32 thoughts on “Max’s Drive-In Movie – Kentucky Fried Movie”

      2. I’m older! lol… I was 8 years old and peeking at the television when my sister started to watch SNL in 75 and 76…mom was asleep…most of it went over my head but Belushi was funny no matter what age.

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    1. I love these time capsule movies like this…some of it still works well. This is the kind of stuff along with Walter Cronkite I want to be doing more of. Not as popular but I love this culture stuff.

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  5. Along with their sketch comedy in the theatre, they had a call-in phone line. Back in those days you could call a number to get the time and another number to get a weather forecast. Kentucky Fried Theatre started a service called “Dial-a-Fart”. It was exactly what it sounds like. The recorded fart noises changed frequently.

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      1. A lot of the genius of the Zucker Brothers and Abrahams was their ability to get actors to play against type (and somehow, as three recent college grads from the Milwaukee suburbs, got major actors to even talk to them). Leslie Nielson was a serious actor before they got their hands on him.

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      2. I’m glad you brought him up…Leslie Nielson. Now when watching Forbidden Planet or any of his old movies or tv spots…I expect him to do something bizarre…those kind of films really defined his career…he was great.
        I wonder if they ever filmed any of those theater shows?

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      3. Since they incorporated video into their early shows, I looked around. I didn’t find any video on line. (I found a Zoom call with Jerry Abrahams talking about their early days, but no video of shows.) Our state historical society has copies of their movies but nothing older. Maybe someday they will donate their personal archives and video from that era will show up.

        Speaking of serious actors, and since you’re a fan of old TV. They also got Robert Stack (Eliot Ness from “The Untouchables”) to play comedy in “Airplane!”.

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      4. I do hope like you said that something pops up from that era…just backstage film clips would be nice. Little did outside people know they were the young stars of comedy that were coming.
        Oh yes…the more serious they are…the more it works in Airplane and movies like that. Barbara Billingsley was a good example as well talking “jive” at the time as well.

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    1. It’s more like SNL…well the old days of SNL…it has good spots and bad spots like any sketch comedy…I like it…but yes much of it is also the Airplane stuff.

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  8. This was one of those movies that kids in middle school talked about but I never saw myself. There’s a follow-up movie, sort of, that also involved Landis called Amazon Women on the Moon that was in constant rotation on cable TV and I saw that one a lot! Another movie I remember watching that was a collection of typically raunchy sketches was The Groove Tube.

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    1. Oh The Groove Tube! Thank you Liam…I’ve been trying to think of that movie. I have it somewhere at home and I really like that movie. I should have wrote that one up…it came out in 1974…before this one.
      I love this kind of humor…it has good and bad sketches but more I really like.
      I never saw the Amazon Women movie…I’ll have to look that up.

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