Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)
Starring: Donald Sutherland
Director: John Landis
Synopsis: Some thoroughly spot on skits from the Airplane team.
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

This is the movie that first brought the comic talents of skit writers Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker and David Zucker to prominence. A few years later they went on to clean up at the Box Office with the Airplane! films both of which made stacks and stacks of money.

Kentucky Fried Movie is a collection of jaunty little skits - from the hysterically funny, to the corny and predictable. The showpiece of the skits is a Kung Fu feature that is riotous with the stone faced villain simply magnificent in his sheer dastardly evilness. Actually most of the skits work are more or less spot on with the one or two boring exceptions being the courtroom skit which is quite unfunny after a long build up. The United Appeal for the Dead is brilliantly deadpan……"the symptoms of death are…"and of course the "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble" is near legendary. The little skit on Blaxploitation "Cleopatra Schwartz"is also spot on. Donald Sutherland, no doubt suffering from having done "Don't Look Now" is spotted in a marvelously lunatic cameo……which other actor would have done the role?

Sutherland has to be lauded for the diversity of his roles over his long career - who can forget the great turn as the pot-head history teacher from Animal House! If Kentucky Fried Movie doesn't have you snickering through at least half the movie, there is something depressingly wrong with the state of affairs.