302. Prime Time

302. Prime Time aka American Raspberry (1977)
Director: Bradley R. Swirnoff
Writers: John Baskin, Stephen Feinberg, Roger Shulman, and Bradley R. Swirnoff
From: Drive-In (only 1 remains!)

A mysterious force has taken over American airwaves and is broadcasting subversive material.

There’s not much plot to summarize here as the movie is, like Kentucky Fried Movie, more a collection of sketches as opposed to something with a plot. Unlike Kentucky Fried Movie, this does have a hint of a frame narrative.

Someone has taken over American television—it’s never revealed who—and is broadcasting material that’s all one or two steps away from traditional media: a hunting show where the host and celebrity guest climb the clock tower at the University of Texas and start shooting students, menacing ads from the Catholic Church saying they’re taking over the world, a Charlie’s Angels parody where everyone—literally everyone—is fat.

The President calls his war council together, but they can’t figure out a way to respond to the situation apart from turning off the TV. The Russians and Chinese deny involvement. Something needs to be done, though. People are rioting in the street. As the President sees more and more ads mocking the military and mainstream products, he snaps and pushes the button, nuking the United States. THE END.

Obviously it’s not a movie that you judge on the plot. It’s a bunch of sketches strung together with no connective tissue whatsoever. And, yes, since its from 1977 it has some of the racist, homophobic, and religiously problematic jokes you’d expect, but I’d say fewer than I thought there would be. I was rolling my eyes less than I was going, “Is that crossing a line?” in response to the problematic jokes. In other words, it wasn’t always clear if the joke was racist or making fun of racist jokes.

And I’ll admit that I laughed a lot—much more than I expected to. Considering how the movie is put together, that makes sense. There’s no build-up and payoff here, it’s just gag after gag after gag. It’s very close to being if a joke doesn’t make you laugh, just a wait a minute, they’ll have something from a completely different genre soon. My favorite line was a throwaway moment of, I think, the General of the Salvation Army walking down the street chanting, “Repent now and Christ and the Pentagon will forgive you.”

My thoughts were that this was pure Subgenius Bulldada, and I’d say that’s good. Not all the gags have aged well, especially the parodies of “Travel to [BLANK]” ads which were all kind of racist, but enough of them landed well enough that I enjoyed the movie and would even go so far as to give it a lukewarm recommendation. There’s nothing groundbreaking or brilliant about it and some bits are parodies of specific things that I didn’t have the context for, but it passed the time well enough. If you just want some mindless gags for 75 minutes, you could do a lot worse.