As cinematically-awful and horribly-made as this film is, I will never stop enjoying it. UHF is the feature film debut of "Weird Al" Yankovic, my childhood comedy idol, who I still admire to this very day. His decades-long career will never be forgotten as he has truly proven himself as the king of pop culture parody. If you were to take one of his ridiculous yet hilarious parody songs of the 1980s and turn it into a feature-length film, this would be quite an accurate representation. Even though it is obvious that Yankovic has never had any experience with writing a screenplay or developing characters, this movie is all one could ever ask for from the comedy musician.
"Weird Al" stars as George Newman, a down-on-his-luck guy whose imagination always seems to get in the way when it comes to stabilizing his work and love life. When his uncle wins a rundown TV station in a gambling bet, he hires George to be its new manager and revitalize its dwindling audience with new programming. If this plot sounds absurd and half-conceived, that's because it definitely is. One of the most memorable and hilarious aspects of Yankovic's creative brain is that he has the power to humorously parody almost anything. His musical ability to flip popular songs on their head and bring new meaning to catchy melodies is incomparable so one might think that would translate to a screen as well; especially since the plot revolves around numerous, offbeat TV shows. As completely random and peculiar as the different show ideas he creates are, they did not blend well with the narrative at all. I could painfully feel the contrast between Yankovic's lack of screenwriting knowledge and director Jay Levey's commitment to creating a cohesive plot. These aspects were fine on their own: Yankovic's weird mind made his fictional television programs hilarious and Levey's directing attempted to bring together these ideas into a story, but they simply could not mesh well together. It is almost as if the writers of the Naked Gun films threw together a bunch of their recycled visual gags and punchlines and tried to salvage a plot from them. While they work fine as skits on their own, they just do not fit into the flow of this story, which is already lazy by nature.
Where this film gets its greatest humor, however, is its actual parodies of other popular films of the time. Even though the story has more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese, many of the parody scenes work for the forwarding of the plot very well. The introduction sequence parodying Indiana Jones and the final chase sequence parodying Rambo are two of the funniest parts of the entire movie. I feel that these scenes work so well because they combine Yankovic's ability to parody with the actual plot of the film. Instead of stealing runtime by distracting the audience from the plot, these scenes work the way they are intended to for the narrative. That being said, this film still manages to be wildly entertaining. There are so many memorable scenes and lines that I still quote to this day, as this movie is a definite visual representation of the zany and colorful mind of the parody songwriter. Sprinkle in the fact that Yankovic actually gives a fairly decent performance as George and you've got a commercial formula for success. Despite this movie's lack of experience in regards to production quality or technical prowess, it is still the perfect 80s film to spectacularly display how culturally important "Weird Al" was and still is to comedy culture.
UHF, while overly-reliant on visual gags and cinematic parodies, succeeds as one of the greatest cult classic films of the 1980s. This movie is by no means an achievement in filmmaking, but it proves itself as an achievement in the hilarious content that "Weird Al" Yankovic is able to provide across different mediums.
My Rating: ★★★½
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