UHF – The Right Movie at the Wrong Time

What happens when you make a movie for weird kids, comedy nerds, TV addicts, and anyone who thinks a flying poodle, a spatula salesman, and Rambo running through a television station sounds like a perfectly reasonable afternoon?

You get UHF.

This week on What We Saw On Stolen Cable, Uncle Patches and Sinister Cinema revisit Weird Al Yankovic’s 1989 cult comedy — a movie that seemed almost designed to become a cable-TV favorite, but first had to survive one of the most brutal summers in movie history.

And it didn’t.

Released into a summer packed with Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, Ghostbusters II, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and more, UHF disappeared from theaters almost as quickly as it arrived.

But something funny happened after that.

People kept watching it.

VHS rentals, cable television, word of mouth, and an audience that finally caught up with its bizarre sense of humor transformed UHF from a box-office disappointment into a genuine cult classic.

We’re talking Weird Al, Michael Richards before Seinfeld, Stanley Spadowski, Wheel of Fish, Conan the Librarian, Spatula City, Gandhi II, Raul’s Wild Kingdom, and a movie that throws jokes at the screen so fast that half the fun is remembering the ones you forgot.

Was UHF simply too strange for 1989?

Did one of the biggest movie summers ever bury a comedy that deserved a better shot?

Or was this always a movie destined to find its real audience on VHS and stolen cable?

Grab your mop, drink from the fire hose, and whatever you do...

DON’T YOU KNOW THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM?!

This is What We Saw On Stolen Cable.

UHF – The Right Movie at the Wrong Time