Justin here with a watching hour preview of one of my sentimental favorites, Weird Al's UHF.
When I was a kid, I spent a good portion of each summer on my uncle Erwin’s farm in Independence, Kansas. Being from Colorado, I was unaccustomed to 100% humidity and the general mid-western-ness of everything. I had some fun, but there was also a lot of boredom. Luckily, I have an awesome cousin. Josh is a few years older than me, he called me once before we were to meet up on the farm and told me he had a totally sweet surprise for me. I waited in anticipation for weeks. Finally, the first night at the farm he gave it to me: two audio cassette tape bootlegs labeled Weird Al in 3-D and UHF. I didn’t get what all the fuss was about until I popped them into my walkman the next night. Holy shit! Thus was a geek for life born.
I wore out those tapes fast. I got all the Weird Al I could get my hands on, I even made my dad take me to a Weird Al concert. For a young 8-10 year old, that stuff is crack. The revelation came one day that there was a movie. I must have rented it a dozen times. We bought a copy, I’m sure I wore out or destroyed it. I bought another copy which I’ve managed to hang on to. The best thing about UHF – even now, fifteen odd years later, it’s still funny and still throws me into maniacal giggle fits.
The premise is simple: Weird Al gets run of a public access TV station, an evil business man tries to shut it down, but in the end the weird-o’s prevail and save the station. This is all an excuse for Weir Al to cut loose with TV and movie parodies like Conan the Librarian, Gandhi II, and Raul’s Wild Kingdom. There are a lot of great character actors in the movie too, Emo Philips, Fran Drescher, Victoria Jackson, and a bunch more you'll recognize from other movies. Weird Al does pretty well himself, his zany personality is a good match for the big screen. Amazingly though, the show gets stolen fairly early on by a very young Michael Richards (Kramer on Sienfeld) as Stanly Spadowski, a spastic, overly enthusiastic janitor who runs an impromptu kids show with segments like find the marble in the oatmeal (the winner gets to drink from a fire hose).
Like everything Weird Al, this is just dumb fun. This is probably the least pretentious movie I’ve ever seen. Everything is fair game to be made fun of and you can’t help but smile. Underneath the parody though is a movie with a lot of heart about the love of movies. If you’re in for a good time, make yourself up a twinkie-weiner sandwich and come down to the Denver Film Center and switch your brain off.
The Watching Hour is a weekly film series at the Denver Film Center, highlighting new and old cult, genre, or otherwise bizarro movies. Quite simply, The Watching Hour is usually the best thing to do in Denver on a Friday or Saturday night. From Giallo to schlock, Blaxploitation to Aussiesploitation, zombies to martial arts to who-knows-what, and everywhere in between. This is good ol’ rock and roll cinema spectacle. Not to be missed. (See the schedule, buy tickets, get directions, etc. here.)