The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
Directed by David Zucker
When the bumbling Lieutenant Frank Drebin investigates events following the shooting of his partner, he stumbles upon an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II.
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What critics compared The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! to
…and The Naked Gun—are characterized by their facility with the tone and detail work of genre films and their genius combination of straight-faced B-movie actors with lowbrow punch lines and sight gags.
One of the central plot devices borrows the notion of the hypnotized zombie killer from the recently rereleased The Manchurian Candidate (1962) — another example of the movie’s tendency to grab at everything in sight rather than limit its focus to one (or even two or three) genres.
Given the two-year gap since their last movie, one might have expected Friedberg/Seltzer might have made more of an effort and come up with some quality gags in the vein of their comedic forefathers the Zucker brothers (Airplane, The Naked Gun).
Would-be comedy flies fast, but it all feels recycled and stupidnot so stupid it's funny, mind you, like in "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun," which actually had brains behind their ridiculousness, but so stupid it's just plain stupid.
…and The Naked Gun were laugh-a-minute, whereas Inherent Vice is more baffled-guffaw-every-now-and-then.
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The Other Guys is never quite a spoof in The Naked Gun vein, but its too comedically distinctive to fall into the common action-comedy trap of avoiding laughs in favor of pyrotechnics.
Wayans' models here appear to be the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team ("Airplane!," "The Naked Gun" series) and the Farrelly Brothers.
Featuring scenes that make American Pie, There's Something About Mary, and Me, Myself and Irene seem almost tame, Scary Movie combines the raunchiness of '90s teen comedies with the single-movie spoof approach of Mel Brooks and the rapid-fire barrage of gags and jokes used in Airplane and The Naked Gun.
Besides being inextricably linked to 1988's spoof extraordinaire "The Naked Gun," the lyrics don't exactly lend themselves to an elementary school choir ("I walked her home and she held my hand/I knew it wouldn't be just a one-night stand").
After the credits rolled I felt like entering the theater lobby and doing my best impression of Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun , as the fireworks store blows up in the background: “Please disperse, there’s nothing to see here!”
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To me, a spoof is a film that takes the cliches inherent in the genre under consideration and then amplifies them in a way that underlines just how ridiculous they are–“The Naked Gun” is a perfect example of a spoof of cop movies.
…or The Naked Gun for gut-busting laughs.
It strikes sort of an agreeable, English accented, Police Squad! tone – not that it relies on that TV show’s sight gags and puns, but that the actors deliver often silly material with a completely straight face.
Unlike cop parodies such as The Naked Gun films, Hot Fuzz builds to genuinely thrilling action scenes, only set in humble grocery stores and cobblestone town squares.
Director Jerry Zucker's resume of raucous farces like "Airplane!", "Ruthless People" and "The Naked Gun" gives no indication of his being capable of sustaining the movie's many shifts of tone and tempo, but he pulls it off, certainly more successfully than Spielberg did in "Always," which was more saccharine than romantic and was weighed down by overblown comic interludes.
…and "The Naked Gun," makes his solo directing debut and displays a knack for mixing comedy, suspense and romance.