The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

John Landis’s funniest work. It’s a 1970s pop culture junkie’s comedy sketch revue, rapid-fire and so raunchy that it had to be cut to avoid an X-rating. The gags are broad enough that you don’t need to be familiar with the dated television commercials and drive-in movies on the skewer here—but it would help, if only to appreciate the accuracy of it all. The fake trailer for “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble” looks exactly like something that New World Pictures would have really done. The kung fu parody, “A Fistful of Yen”, nails the surfaces and flavor of a Bruce Lee film. The intriguing thing is that these aren’t merely parodies of premises and characters; they’re also well-observed parodies of several low-brow filmmaking styles. Landis treats trash with affection and earns a place among the day’s new generation of movie brat directors. Along with writers David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams (who adapt sketches from their live comedy troupe, Kentucky Fried Theater, for their script here), Landis would go on to help set the tone for the next decade of mainstream American comedy movies.