After George and Bob again get fired from their jobs at a fast food restaurant, he gets a golden opportunity to be in charge of a TV station, Channel 62, which his uncle Harvey won in a bet. At first, the ratings plummet, but the viewers gain an inexplicable fascination with the show hosted by janitor Stanley, which catapults Channel 62 among the top 10 most watched stations. This angers Fletcher, the CEO of a rival TV station, who orders the kidnapping of Stanley in order for Channel 62 to fail at a fundraising event to pay for Harvey’s 75,000 $ debt. George, however, is able to save Stanley and Channel 62, as well as reunite with his girlfriend Teri.
"Weird Al" Yankovic’s feature length star vehicle is a disappointment: you have to plow your way through three bad jokes on average to get to one good joke—and some of the bad jokes really are crude and vile at times. 80% of "UHF" seems like some bad "Family Guy" episode: the episodic clip format is able to insert dozens of wacky jokes and parodies, yet it lacks that genuine sense for comedy and a tighter filtration process to distinguish which jokes work and which simply don’t. The films starts with an Indiana Jones parody, but its level never goes beyond the lame scenes of George turning his head for 180 degrees behind his back or using a whip to hack off (?!) the arm of a villain who aimed a gun at him. This whole intro could have been disposed off. Unfortunately, the rest is not anything better, either: for instance, in one scene, the aunt pulls George’s skin for almost 4 inches away from his cheeks. Wild, outrageous comedies are often the funniest due to their untrammelled nature, yet if the authors wanted to make a human cartoon, they should have done it with class: the Marx brothers and the Monty Pythons also often went into the silly territory, but watched out not to end up retarded—they were silly in a sophisticated way. This is what “UHF” lacks. In one scene, George hosts a show, and a guest accidentally cuts off his own thumb on a saw machine. The blood spills all over, and the guest is calm, but none of this is funny. So what’s the point of this scene? Anybody can write lame, shock jokes, but only selected few can craft funny ones. Only a couple of good jokes manage to be inspired, for instance the hilarious TV commercial which warns of bad funeral services, displaying a scene of legs of corpses sticking out from the ground of a cemetery, or the trailer for “Gandhi II”, in this edition, an action film. “UHF” seems like the authors had an idea for a good 20 minute comedy, but then had to prolong it to a feature film, and thus assembled a disparate collection of forced episodes with grimaces, but without a point, forgetting that a writer does not always use *every* idea that automatically pops into his head.
Grade:+
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