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.
..,
PowerPop... An Eclectic Collection of Pop Culture 