New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

I am torn over whether my enjoyment of Airplane II is really a ringing endorsement of ZAZ for all the similarities between the two, or Finkleman’s success in a no-win situation. (It is probably not for nothing that Paramount didn’t pursue any further films in the series. Airplane II only grossed about a quarter of what Airplane! did but it made more than Top Secret! eventually would.) It pulled off blank-faced stupidity as well as its predecessor, gave me just as many laughs, and I have no doubt that, me being me, I will be pointlessly pondering over the ludicrousness of the plot semantics for at least another 25 years.

Amazon Women on the Moon is a follow-up to The Kentucky Fried Movie in spirit and concept more than anything. Coming ten years after the fact, it follows a similar pattern of short skits and fadeout jokes, intermixed with recurring gags and a central “feature-length” faux movie at the center. Finished in 1986, it wound up being dumped on to only 50 screens in September 1987, grossing just over $500,000. Director John Landis (who directed KFM and also executive produces here) shares the helm with four other directors. Between them, the five contribute nearly 20 segments, primarily built around the notion of a television station’s attempt to play a 1950s sci-fi film as the late night feature, only to see it constantly interrupted with commercials, technical problems, and the like.

Two of the other directors (Carl Gottlieb and Peter Horton) had extensive background in television, the former as a writer and director, the latter as an actor - he’s best known for thirtysomething - who was just beginning to switch over to directing. Cult director Joe Dante had worked with both ZAZ (he directed two episodes of Police Squad!) and Landis (on the omnibus film Twilight Zone: The Movie) and had recently helmed a pair of episodes of Steven Spielberg’s television series Amazing Stories and one episode of the television reboot of The Twilight Zone.

The Kentucky Fried Movie launched both Landis and ZAZ (who wrote the screenplay) on their successful career paths and 35 years later, its comedy, though largely dated, still holds up. As a whole, the film satirizes and lampoons the burgeoning media of the time, particularly reality programming, and local news programming with their attempts to mix the homey with the outraged (and outrageous), along with a lot of fake commercials. The kung fu parody A Fistful of Yen (imagine Enter the Dragon crossed with one of the lesser Bonds of the decade) takes up nearly a third of the film, and is enjoyable but goes on far too long.

In the brief closing skit, “Eyewitness News,” the gag is that it’s the station that’s watching as a distracted couple gets hot and heavy on the couch. ZAZ play three of the four on-camera leerers, and the meta aspect of the scenario, implicating themselves as the voyeurs and perverts elevates the sketch above being just a vulgar little ditty to send the audience on its way (I can only imagine this moment playing out on a big screen at a drive-in in 1977 for if there was ever a movie meant for drive-in viewing, it’s KFM.) The other big surprise, is that the soft-core sex actually manages to be, well, sexy.

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5