Does love for KFC chicken conquer all? Find out in this new Lifetime movie

A “finger-lickin” origin story about KFC’s apparently “sexy” Colonel Sanders, played by Saved by the Bell’s Mario Lopez, in a romantic epic so spicy that you’d be forgiven to label it as “Louisiana hot”. 

Uh . . . what? 

Sorry, Lifetime network – we’re calling your bluff. 

The trailer for Lifetime’s new short film, A Recipe for Seduction, dropped online in the last twenty-four houses, leaving viewers as confused as to when KFC first announced its “famous bowl” concoction back in 2006. 

Yes, the KFC puns will continue throughout this piece, or should we say, “8-piece”? 

Expected to air on December 13, 2020, the Lifetime short film, which is expected to run for fifteen minutes, is said to have all of the mystery, romance, and suspense one would expect in a romantic drama. 

Even at fifteen minutes long, we’re still skeptical about the intentions of this short film, as its casting and the overall tone of the trailer feels too familiar to other spoof projects we’ve seen in the past. 

Fake trailers

Made popular by 2008’s Tropic Thunder, a film which opened with a series of spoof trailers that set up the film (including an incredible Oscar-bait trailer of Robert Downey Jr. & Tobey Maguire as a pair of gay monks), we’ve seen the success of releasing fake trailers that are made for ulterior marketing purposes. 

Most famously, the series of fake trailers in 2018 for the Danny McBride-led Crocodile Dundee sequel, titled Dundee, featured a collection of Australian A-listers including Chris Hemsworth, Margot Robbie, Hugh Jackman, and Russell Crowe that were revealed during the Superbowl to be a string of tourism ads for Australia. 

KFC marketing

KFC has noticeably had one of the more clever marketing campaigns these last several years, having multiple actors don the white suit & goatee over time, including talent such as Ray Liotta, Rob Lowe, George Hamilton, and, uh, Reba McEntire? 

The campaign does a great job of celebrating the Colonel as not just a person, but as an ideal, sort of like Batman, where multiple people can wear the mask of Colonel Sanders while preaching the good news of fried chicken with your choice of two sides. 

A Recipe for Seduction

While we’re convinced this Lifetime project might be just another clever marketing campaign on the part of KFC, let it be known that if this short-film actually has the b@!!s to take itself seriously, then we’re witnessing a true “original recipe” for disaster. 

After all, we’re in the season where cheesy romance dramas seem to thrive, as the Hallmark channel has a slate of twenty-three new holiday-themed movies in 2020 alone. 

A Recipe for Seduction’s plot revolves around an heiress, whose mother’s future plans for her daughter and her pretentious, 1980s-style Ivy League suitor are derailed by the arrival of a handsome chef, Harland Sanders (Lopez).

That’s a lot of story for just fifteen minutes, wouldn’t you say? 

Original mini-movies

The trailer boldly presents in its final card “Presented by Kentucky Fried Chicken”, which the last time we checked was not a major production studio, but rather a fast-food chain that makes a mediocre ranch dipping-sauce and delicious fried apple pies. 

The trailer and the actors in it don’t seem to be taking the project too seriously, which furthers the speculation that this short film is nothing more than a marketing piece for either a rollout of a new KFC product (Beyond chicken, anyone?) or perhaps the start of something bigger, like evolving KFC’s clever commercial ads to a series of mini-movies of the Colonel’s fictional past.

I mean, we’d be down for a Tom Hardy-led crime-thriller about the Colonel smuggling illegal herbs from another country. 

KFC presents: No Thyme to Die.

It should be noted there’s also a voiceover narrator for the trailer, a nearly extinct trend in movie advertising which should be a dead giveaway of this trailer’s intentions of parody.  

Who knows? Perhaps this short film is indeed a romantic thriller that will steal the hearts of its audiences and coat them in KFC’s eleven secret herbs & spices.

Don’t be a chicken and tune in!

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Catch A Recipe for Seduction on the Lifetime channel on December 13, 2020.