Opening with an elaborate, extended Raiders of the Lost Ark spoof, UHF is never as funny as it wishes it were, but is too darn likable to knock it for the gap. In essence, the movie is like that one guy at the office who always wears short-sleeved button-down shirts: You’ll never vacation with him, but hey — dude brings donuts!
The first and final big-screen showcase of polka-leaning parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic, UHF casts the Grammy-winning chart clown as George, a minimum-wage loser whose sole hope for redemption is also a long shot: making a success of his uncle’s penny-ante TV station, channel 62.
Through a mix of sheer luck and sheer stupidity, rating skyrocket under George’s watch. Turns out viewers can’t get enough of watching a game show where contestants win fish, or a nature series in which the hosts hurls poodles out an apartment window. Channel 62’s smash, however, is a live kids’ program starring station janitor Stanley Spadowski (a pre-Seinfeld Michael Richards), who isn’t all there mentally, but that’s no prerequisite for having children drink from a fire hose. All of their Nielsen fortune means squat if George and friends can’t raise $75,000 to settle his shyster uncle’s debt.
From Spatula City to Gandhi 2, the fake commercials strung throughout UHF provide more of a jolt to the funny bone than the actual story. Yankovic, who co-wrote the flick with his videos’ director Jay Levey, is a pleasant comic protagonist even when his lampooning finger isn’t exactly on the pop-culture pulse; the worst offender is a dreamt video that simultaneously pokes fun at Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” and The Beverly Hillbillies — then a respective 4 and 27 years old. Yankovic and Levey’s collaboration falls short of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker vibe it tries to emulate, but respectfully so. It’s a shame that, unlike George, they never got another chance. —Rod Lott