In the 80s, a few cult musicians and TV stars made and/or
performed in some zany, frantic films.
1982, Richard Elfman directed the musical-vaudeville hybrid, Forbidden Zone, as a vehicle for his
band, Oingo Boingo. Before revising his
aesthetics for commercial fare like Dark
Shadows and Alice and Wonderland,
Tim Burton made a freewheeling road movie with the one-man novelty act, Paul
Reubens, in the candy-colored world of Pee-Wee’s
Big Adventure.
Rounding out this triumvirate of 80s cinema pop-art is UHF, a showcase for music parodist,
‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, and his absurdist humor, which consists of high-strung, Looney
Tunes antics and playful anarchism á la Jerry
Lewis. Al’, our plucky hero, inherits a
run-down local television station from an uncle. Eventually, he makes something out of it, a
leading TV station. Managed by a militant
Kevin McCarthy, a rival station leading in viewer ratings plots to suppress
Al’s – it’s a tale of the struggling have-nots versus the oily haves for
laughs.
No sense of pace and paying no attention to coherence, the
story does not really matter, functioning simply as a chain for ‘Weird Al’ to
string along his odd-ball gags, making the film seem schizophrenic. This is a more hyperactive derivative of the
Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films that saturated the 80s.
Packed with intertextual film references, popping primary
colors, self-reflexive gestures (Early on in the film, we see ‘Weird Al’s’ face
dissolve into a shot of a hamburger patty sizzling on a grill, making the film
technique readily apparent), UHF seems Tashlinesque.
The film, however, is missing a key staple of this sensibility – social
satire. Instead, UHF indulges in parody – satire numbed of a political edge.
UHF is a
post-modern joke machine, pumping out gags a minute, sweetened by hysteria and
visual inventiveness.
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