CREDIT: UNITED FILM DISTRIBUTION
The grandfather of sketch comedy films is as crude as it is funny.

Remember Movie 43? Or, rather, remember trying to forget Movie 43? A jumbled mess of a film that thought extreme juvenility without a punchline could still be funny, Movie 43 was a series of unconnected skits that formed no narrative. Although a rather unusual gimmick, the premise of an entirely sketch-based movie with no underlying narrative or connections (save for running gags) is hardly anything new within mainstream Hollywood. In fact, you'll find Movie 43's predecessors that inspired it to be a lot of more successful at being funny (and better at being genuinely risqué).

It all began in earnest with the Zucker Brothers' Kentucky Fried Movie. Much like Movie 43, it too was a series of unrelated, pop-culture mocking sketches tied together only with a few running jokes. And it was funny. KFM spoofed everything that was right (but largely wrong) with the 1970s, an embarrassing decade most would rather forget. Everything from the oil crisis to the overabundance of schlocky exploitation and kung fu movies is spoofed (in the movie's finest moment, a 20-minute long parody of Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon called A Fistful of Yen will leave you confused and amused) in an unrelentingly funny manner.

This being the '70s, before the rise of Reaganistic conservative values, there is a LOT of nudity in Kentucky Fried Movie... some of it bordering softcore pornography. Don't let that dissuade you from watching it (who am I kidding, you're probably hooked on the idea already) but just... don't watch it with your parents. It probably will help greatly to have a decent knowledge of everything '70s, but barring even that, the movie is still hugely entertaining and a welcome addition to any party, simply for its absurdist sense of humour.

KFM was a smash hit that recouped its miniscule budget and much more, launching the career of the Zucker brothers and leading them to create well-loved (and notably less raunchy) comedy classics like Airplane! (with the deadpan of the great Leslie Nielsen) and the Naked Gun movies. However, KFM's success didn't exactly popularize comedic anthology films as a whole.

Paving the way in this rather sparse genre was the spiritual sequel Amazon Women on the Moon, which featured the return of John Landis (who had since made Thriller and An American Werewolf in London). Where KFM was largely a parody of '70s popculture, AWotM hits a bit closer to our modern sensibilities with its parodying of low-rent cable TV staples: inane infomercials, public domain movies from '40s and '50s and zero-budget TV documentaries with inane subject matter. While not quite holding a candle to KFM, AWotM still stands the test of time as a funny movie for those who catch the references, and perhaps a snort or two of amusement for those who don't.

There have been comedy anthology movies since the aforementioned, some good (The Onion Movie), some terrible (ShamWow! Vince's Underground Comedy Movie), all viewable at your discretion. But don't let the awful side of the genre turn you away from the good it has to offer. At the very least, sketches blown up to a movie format will guarantee some form of quality and production value, maybe even attract some talent (Gremlins' own Joe Dante at the director's seat of AWotM), and that will likely elicit some amusement from you, for the right or wrong reasons.