Friday 8 August 2014

Prime Time (1977)



1977's Kentucky Fried Movie launched a spate of 'anthology' films: movies comprised mostly of short sketches, with a framing 'feature story' to link them together.

Under the title American Raspberry, this film was produced by Warner Brothers as a low budget entry into the genre (its budget was well under 10% of that of Kentucky Fried Movie, possibly under 5%).  On completion, though, they took one look at it and shelved it for three years.

What rescued the film from the Warner's vault appears to have been the Golan and Globus years at Cannon.  G&G were pretty renowned for buying ultra-cheap scripts and films, sort of like a latter day Roger Corman approach to film, and they'd made teen sex comedies before coming to the US, so puerile junk like this was right up their alley.  And - no disrespect to G&G intended, because the world is a better place for having American Ninja 2 in it - this movie is definitely puerile junk.

The linking story here is that some unknown force has taken over the "TV waves" and is broadcasting a series of "outrageous" skits and parodies.  And I guess, if you find the most obvious and banal efforts to be subversive and edgy funny, you might enjoy this.  But frankly, when the height of your humour is a "sexual deviants telethon" and "let's make a Charlie's Angels parody where everyone is obese", then I'm not going to be much impressed.

There are shows that take being completely inappropriate and turn it into very funny material - I'm a big fan of Archer, for instance - but this is not one of them.

This rot is also sometimes titled Funny America, which is ironic given that it has a skit about 'truth in advertising'.  Avoid.

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