The eccentric new manager of a UHF television channel tries to save the station from financial ruin with an odd array of programming.
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Reviews
I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
A lot of fun.
I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.
The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
Good comedy is hard, but this one succeeds big time. Satirizing the absolute crap that's on daily TV is an idea that sounds easy, but the absurdity of the shows that the dying UHF station comes up with are spot on. Usually a comedy of this kind will have a few bright spots, but UHF has a high density of serious laughs all the way through. There's clever imagination in the writing, and the idea that a station that's absurd in the extreme could become wildly popular is made credible. It made my day, what more can you ask of a low budget project.
With someone as iconic in comedy as Weird Al Yankovic, it only fits that he would get his own movie sooner or later. It ended up being sooner. I must say that I didn't even know he was that popular back in 1989. I'd love to see another movie from him! This movie did better with audiences than it did critics and honestly, I can see why some people wouldn't like it. It can be pretty childish, but it's mostly very funny.I think the funniest part is when he mentions the nihilistic nature of the Wile E. Coyote cartoons. The dog treats gag was great too. There are a fair number of little things always going on. I've seen a lot of people allude to this movie. While not a classic IMHO, it's still good. Weird Al is just that talented. ***
Well there isn't a whole lot more to say really. With a lead character played by Weird Al Yankovic, you basically need to build a framework around him to make sure the film doesn't come across as really just a 1,5 hour long sketch.There's a bit of story here, and well it's easily enough and fine in itself for this sort of film, after all the point isn't to give a textbook example of how to structure a film brilliantly, the point is to laugh and have fun. But there are still rules to achieve that.So they do well at producing the right environment for the main funny people, Weird Al and Michael Richards, to go fully bananas and have a platform to channel their comedic effort. At the core of it, it's a lot of various independent sketches, and most of them are funny. The rest of the film is funny. It plays out well enough, and well if anything it's a little bit underrated and is a bit of a cult classic.
Daydreamer George Newman (Weird Al Yankovic) can't hold down a job and gets his best friend Bob (David Bowe) fired as well. Their friend Kuni (Gedde Watanabe) runs a karate school. His uncle Harvey Bilchik wins a rundown UHF TV station Channel 62 in a poker game. His aunt convinces Harvey to make him the manager. He and his girlfriend Teri (Victoria Jackson) go to the station and find the weird engineer Philo (Anthony Geary). Receptionist Pamela Finklestein (Fran Drescher) wants to be a reporter. He goes to meet R.J. Fletcher (Kevin McCarthy), rival owner of Channel 8. Evil Fletcher throws him out. As he leaves, he hires weird janitor Stanley Spadowski (Michael Richards) who was just fired by Fletcher for Fletcher's own mistake. George decides to put on original programming instead of the endless reruns of old shows.This is an excuse for Weird Al to make spoofs of movies and TV shows which he jams into the script. It also allows Michael Richards to go nuts in one of the many crazy TV shows. The comedy is generally at a pretty silly level. The stupidity gets a few laughs but it's mostly hit-and-miss. It's reminiscent of SCTV.