UHF (1989)

The laughs just keep rolling as 'Weird Al' makes a movie. Overheard from a still-convulsing woman after a recent screening of Weird Al Yankovic's UHF: "I'm sorry, but that's funny." I'm sorry, but she's right. Yuks you feel obliged to apologize for are yuks nonetheless. And UHF prompts a lot of apologies.

The movie is forever digressing so that Mr. Yankovic can offer media spoofs that have only the most tangential relation to the story. [22 Jul 1989, p.1.15]

Yankovic fails to come up with anything new to freshen the stock storyline, and is content instead to let it serve as a creaky showcase for his forte, media parodies. But even the quality of these parodies is inconsistent, with the movie and music takeoffs being obvious and out of date.

UHF is not a uniformly funny experience, unless you have to wear a bib and tend to laugh at anything, such as sudden gusts of wind. Yankovic, co-writing with manager Jay Levey (who also directed), goes for gag after gag. Some hit, some miss. You laugh, you cry.

Gamely running through parodies of TV commercials and shows, not to mention Spielberg, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Selznick, and Gandhi, the movie proves to be awful by any standards--feeble, corny, and labored in script as well as direction--although the Capracorn of the basic premise occasionally manages to convey a certain sweetness.