12 days of Christmas: The KFC Christmas love story
Did you have KFC releasing a Lifetime Christmas movie starring a sexy Latino Colonel Sanders on your 2020 bingo? Yeah, me neither, but someone on the KFC marketing team struck gold with this new marketing strategy.
KFC’s new 15-minute flick “A Recipe for Seduction” has everything you could ever want in a Lifetime Christmas movie. It’s a romance, comedy, murder thriller and Christmas movie all in one quick package. If you’ve ever wanted to watch something that makes you think, “Is the real Colonel Sanders watching this from fried chicken heaven?” then this is the movie for you.
If you don’t dabble in Lifetime Christmas movies, this movie might make you regret your use of 15 minutes, but fans of this high-caliber film genre will recognize this short film for the masterpiece it is.
“A Recipe for Seduction” follows a young, beautiful heiress who leaves her rich fiancé to make out with a man who makes fried chicken that she met two days ago.
Said young, beautiful heiress has it all: rich fiancé who she has to marry or else her family loses their giant mansion, a gay best friend to exchange exasperated looks with at the dinner table, and an insane mother who is also getting down with the rich fiancé on the side and trying to kill people with broomsticks.
The great thing about this movie is that you don’t even judge her for giving it all up for the chicken guy. If I was that young, beautiful heiress, I’d also risk it all for Colonel Sanders with his tight shirt and secret chicken recipe.
Because “A Recipe for Seduction” is so short, this film wastes no time on exposition, and plot twists happen at such a rapid pace that the film never gets tedious. It spirals from the classic romantic Lifetime Christmas movie to a dark murder flick in just a few minutes.
The mother, who for some reason can’t just marry the rich man she’s having an affair with herself, goes from an overbearing mother to an attempted murderer very quickly, and it’s the most delightful character development.
What’s also refreshing about this film is how tasteful the marketing is. It has its fair share of shots of fried chicken, but all fried chicken plugs are very plot relevant.
Though it’s disappointing that the only hint that it’s even Christmas is the gaudy Christmas trees in every corner of Jessica’s estate, this is pretty par for the course for Lifetime Christmas movies, which tend to be “Christmas” movies in the loosest sense of the word.
The film ends on a thrilling cliffhanger, leaving viewers wondering, is there more for sexy Colonel Sanders? I, for one, sure hope so.
In all seriousness— at least as serious as one can get about sexy Colonel Sanders— “A Recipe for Seduction” is a great ad. It may be an objectively horrible movie, but I have been thinking about Colonel Sanders for about two days straight now, which is longer than any human should be thinking about Colonel Sanders. This marketing scheme certainly does its job, and I was thoroughly entertained the whole time.
If you also want to develop a concerning attraction to Colonel Sanders and experience this “steamy holiday love affair” for yourself, you can watch A Recipe for Seduction here.
—darcy.ritchie@usu.edu
@darcyrrose
Darcy Ritchie is a second-year journalism student at Utah State from Idaho Falls, Idaho. Outside of writing for the Statesman, she loves to DJ for Aggie Radio, eat french bread in the Walmart parking lot, and tweet.