UHF

UHF

I grew up on Weird Al's album's and music videos (he was even the first concert I ever went to), because Weird Al made the best clean, goofy comedy for kids that could ever be possible. As an adult I still thoroughly enjoy Weird Al and his major contributions to the current alternative comedy scene, but in the 80's and 90's he was hugely popular in the mainstream due to his delightful parodies of the most popular music at the time, namely just about every Michael Jackson song ever made.

So, in 1989, he got to make a major motion picture. And it's exactly what you think it would be.

UHF tells the story of a loser named George (played by Weird Al) who, through very bizarre circumstances, ends up managing a public TV station. There's a mad scientist who gives Weird Al powers of some kind, he's got an uncle who owes the mob gambling debts, the guy who owns the public access station is essentially a supervillian, Fran Drescher is their receptionist but also a reporter, and Michael Richards is a janitor who accidentally becomes a Bozo the Clown-esque TV star. This movie completely insane. But not always in a good way.

The film's at its absolute best when it's just doing comedy sketches. There are fake commercials (Spatula City, Plots 'R Us Mortuary Service), fake movie trailers (Conan the Librarian, Gandhi II), home nature shows (Raul's Wild Kingdom), music videos ("Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies"), a terrible Bozo the Clown/Howdy Doody-type kid's show, and big-scale parodies of Raiders of the Lost Ark and First Blood. These are all sublimely stupid and funny, and honestly they should've just been the whole movie because they're more than enough to enjoy. Unfortunately, we get a plot too.

Any time the movie isn't doing a parody or a sketch, it's following a very cliche plot about a loser who's trying to get his girlfriend back and there's a big corporate bad guy who's hassling him. There's almost nothing from this side of the movie that made me laugh (Al's crying voice message to his girlfriend easily being the funniest thing), and sadly it's the vast majority of the movie. They clearly tried punching it up by filling these boring scenes with as many silly slapstick gags as they possibly could, which somehow only made them even more cringe-worthy.

It seems like they were trying to be like Airplane!, where there's a cliche plot that doesn't matter because there's a gag-a-second and they're all funny, when it would be much better for them to just be Kentucky Fried Movie, a feature-length movie made entirely of comedic sketches.

It's completely uneven, and the heavy side of the teeter-totter is full of unfunny goofs and pointless plot, but that other side is just so bizarre and so funny that I'd still say it's worth checking out. Just keep your finger on that fast-forward button, cause you won't be missing much between the sketches.