Welcome to Cultured Cult, the column where I examine a cult film in detail. A cult film is generally defined as any film or film genre that a group of people have a great appreciation for, sometimes bordering on obsession. In other words, yes, any film with a cult following. Common genres include certain horror movies, weirdo science fiction, biker movies, good-bad movies (films that are objectively bad that are nevertheless entertaining), bizarre comedies, trash cinema, 70’s porno, all sorts of drive-in movies, blaxploitation, and experimental films on the fringes of good taste. It’s certainly a very broad definition, and one that I’ll feel free to add to as time goes on. The wonderful thing about this non-genre genre is its wonderful fluidity.
I should have been the perfect demographic for UHF when it was released in theaters in 1989. The film was co-written and starred “Weird Al” Yankovic, after all. I probably listened to his album Even Worse more than anything else, even the album that it parodied, Michael Jackson’s Bad. I was obsessed with Yankovic’s music, and yet I didn’t see UHF in the theaters. But the movie came out in the summer of 1989, which was probably the best year for summer blockbusters ever. Instead of UHF, my friends and I saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and, of course, Batman. It was a pretty great summer for a kid on the cusp of turning nine, and UHF simply didn’t stand a chance.
Yankovic and his manager Jay Levey started writing the script in 1985, and the movie went into production in 1988 with a five million dollar budget and Levey directing. The film was shot in Tulsa, not just because it was cheaper than LA, but because there was a shopping mall there that had recently gone out of business, which provided the perfect location for film sets.
UHF is cute and mostly non-offensive, at least by late-80s standards, though there’s load of cartoonish violence. I think it’s still mostly okay for families to watch with their kids, though, of course, the Japanese character Kuni (Gedde Watanabe) speaks in stereotypical broken English that doesn’t hold up at all thirty years later. Besides that, though, the movie is quite good natured, parodying pop cultural touchstones lovingly, and without a sense of malice.
The film is basically a vehicle for parody sketches, with a thin plotline tying them all together. As a result, the main story arc isn’t that great, and there’s not a lot to it. But the frame story aside, UHF is almost the visual version of a “Weird Al” album.
Probably the two most remembered sketches parody Rambo and Conan the Barbarian, two iconic 80s properties. In the Rambo sketch, Yankovic uses rubber body suit, complete with protruding veins, as he skewers the familiar tropes from the Stallone action flicks, mostly parts II and III. Al is able to hit everything he even remotely aims his gun at, and even an enemy shooting at point black range misses hitting him. In the end, Al-as-Stallone destroys an array of international monuments and landmarks, shooting at them from a helicopter. This is kind of how I picture explaining to the leader of an alien civilization what 80’s action movies were like.
The Conan sketch is shorter, but just as fun. Conan (Roger Callard) is now a librarian. At one point he cuts a patron in half, and when another person asks where he can find books on astronomy, he lifts the wimp into the air, looks him in the face and says, “Don’t you know the Dewey Decimal System?” For me, this is the funniest line in the movie, and I lose my shit whenever I hear it.
Another favorite of mine is the live children’s show hosted by Michael Richard’s Stanley Spadowski. It’s an amped up version of those cheap local kids shows with clowns, old cartoon, magic tricks, puppets, etc. It always reminds me of the super cheesy Saturday Showboat that came on at 5AM on Saturdays, airing out of Syracuse, New York. Of course, the UHF version of this show is far more violent, with clowns getting hit in the face with frying pans and children getting shot across the room with fire hoses. If this happened on my local show, I would certainly have enjoyed it more, instead of impatiently waiting for it to end so that I could watch The Gummi Bears.
Perhaps the film’s most bizarre sketch is an animal show hosted by a guy named Raul (Trinidad Silva), who has apparently hacked into the station’s feed. (Nobody remembers hiring him.) Raul tapes the show from his apartment as he shows off various animals that he hoards in his little apartment. He tosses a turtle on the ceiling to prove that they stick, he shakes up an ant farm to destroy their tunnels, and he “teaches” a poodle to fly by tossing it out of his apartment window, several storeys above the ground. Later, we see a pile of dead poodles underneath his third storey window. I’m not sure how well this gag has aged, but even in 1989, this was one of the main reasons UHF got a PG-13 rating.
Every now and then a parody commercial is thrown in. The funniest of these is the one for Spatula World. Yep, in keeping with Al’s penchant for food-related gags, we get a commercial for a Walmart-sized superstore that sells nothing but spatulas. Interestingly, there was an actual billboard for the Spatula World store put up for the film, but it wasn’t in a very high traffic area, so it remained up for months, confusing motorists passing by, some of which got off at the next exit thinking they’d actually find this very odd store.
While the sketches are good, often top-notch, Levey’s direction is…not bad. It’s pretty static, but it’s economical and gets the job done well enough. But it’s certainly not a highlight. But that’s okay because, besides the writing, the cast is what makes UHF really memorable.
Fran Drescher plays the TV station’s secretary. She wants to be a reporter, and when Al’s character George Newman takes over as manager, he agrees to let her go on camera, and her nasally voice hilariously sets her apart from, well, just about every reporter ever. Along with a dwarf cameraman named Noodles (Billy Barty), they would certainly have been the most unique news team in the area.
The movie also features a pre-Seinfeld, pre-racist-rant Michael Richards. He’s actually quite wonderful as Stanley Spandowsky, the rubbery, hapless idiot janitor with oversized teeth. “Weird Al” enjoyed his work on the Saturday Night Live ripoff Fridays, so he asked him to audition. Actually, Richards’ portrayal of Spandowsky might be the film’s standout performance.
Kuni, the Japanese character mentioned earlier, is quite funny if you can put aside the cringy stereotype. Part of this has to do with the sketch he’s placed in. Kuni, a karate instructor by trade, becomes the host of a weird game show at the UHF station called Wheel of Fish, where contestants spin a giant wheel with fish nailed to it and can choose to keep the fish that wheel lands on or instead choose whatever mystery item is in a small box. Interestingly, real fish were nailed to the wheel, so the set started to reek terribly after a while.
UHF is a strange movie to categorize. It’s not a great film, but it’s not bad enough to be so-bad-it’s-good. The pacing gets a little muddled, and the story that attempts to hold the sketches together isn’t very compelling. But individual sketches can be hilarious, and that’s where the movie really shines. It’s no surprise then, that the sketches have become quite popular, individually, on YouTube. They consistently get hundreds of thousands, or even millions of views. Perhaps in a way, “Weird Al” was making a movie for a medium and a generation that didn’t exist yet. In this way, UHF was quite ahead of its time.
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