Storyline A re-run of many of the gags from the original TV series 'Police Squad'. An Airplane type spoof, this time with the an incompetent lieutenant (Drebin) who always 'gets his man'. Visual gags come thick and fast, and it's impossible to catch them all with one viewing. The plot.. Queen Elizabeth II of England is coming to town, and Vincent Ludwig has plans to assassinate her using a brainwashed baseball player.
Writers: Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams
Cast: Leslie Nielsen
-
Frank Drebin
Priscilla Presley
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Jane Spencer
Ricardo Montalban
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Vincent Ludwig
George Kennedy
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Ed Hocken
O.J. Simpson
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Nordberg
Susan Beaubian
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Mrs. Nordberg
Nancy Marchand
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Mayor
Raye Birk
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Pahpshmir
Jeannette Charles
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Queen Elizabeth II
Ed Williams
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Ted Olsen
Tiny Ron
-
Al
'Weird Al' Yankovic
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'Weird Al'
Leslie Maier
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'Weird Leslie'
Winifred Freedman
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Stephie
Joe Grifasi
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Foreman
Taglines:
The Villain. Even Mother Teresa wanted him dead.
Release Date: 2 December 1988
Filming Locations: University of San Diego, San Diego, California, USA
Opening Weekend: $9,300,000
(USA)
(4 December 1988)
Gross: $78,041,829
(USA)
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Did You Know?
Trivia:
The baseball blooper reel shows a ballplayer's head coming off when he crashes into a fence. This scene is a tribute to a quote from San Diego Padres announcer Jerry Coleman: "Winfield goes back to the wall. He hits his head on the wall - and it rolls off! It's rolling all the way back to second base! This is a terrible thing for the Padres."
Goofs:
Revealing mistakes:
One of the players thrown out of the pile during the players scrum is obviously a dummy.
Quotes: Det. Nordberg:
Drugs... drugs... Frank:
Nurse! Get this man some drugs! Can't you see he's in pain?
[nurse administers drugs]
Det. Nordberg:
No... no...
[pulls Frank towards him]
Det. Nordberg:
Heroin, Frank! Heroin... Frank:
Uh... that's a pretty tall order, Nordberg. You'll have to give me a couple of days on that one.
User Review
What we can learn from this film
Rating: 9/10
The real question that "The Naked Gun" poses is not why it's one of the
funniest spoofs ever made, but why virtually no subsequent movie in
this genre has been any good at all. I used to adore this sort of movie
when I was a kid--"Airplane," "Top Secret," and the six-episode "Police
Squad" show, which became the basis for the "Naked Gun" series, were
among the funniest films I knew. When I first saw "The Naked Gun" in
the theater when I was eleven, I was in uncontrollable laughter for the
first few minutes. That was my standard of great humor at the time.
But the following decades gave us a variety of similar spoof films,
some of which involved one or more of the Zucker-Abrams-Nielsen team,
and none of these films were even remotely in the league of their
predecessors. These included "Hot Shots," "Loaded Weapon 1," "Jane
Austen's Mafia," "Spy Hard," "Wrongfully Accused," and "Scary Movie."
These films would typically feature some funny stuff, but you'd walk
away indifferently, wondering what the overall point was. Seeing a
ponytailed Leslie Nielsen imitating John Travolta's dance sequence in
"Pulp Fiction" is funny for a second, but there's nothing enduring
about such humor. An entire movie filled with such scenes doesn't
amount to much. What's the big deal about such jokes, anyway? There's
nothing intrinsically funny about making references to other films,
even if you do it in a silly way. At what point did the genre go wrong
and become such a dreary, uninspired affair? Is it that I've just
outgrown this sort of humor?
I have another theory. When I first watched "The Naked Gun" at age
eleven, I had not seen many of the movies it was spoofing, such as the
early James Bond pictures. I was vaguely familiar with some of the
clichés it was making fun of, but many of the political and sexual
jokes went right over my head. And the celebrity cameos meant nothing
to me. So what was it about the film that appealed to me so much, that
made me laugh till my sides hurt?
The answer is simple: it was the film's utter silliness. Think of the
scene at the beginning when we discover that Ayatollah Khomeini
secretly sports a mohawk underneath his turban. Or the opening credits
where the police car goes on the sidewalk, inside buildings, on a
roller coaster, and so on. None of this makes any sense, of course;
it's just an exercise in pure absurdity. I loved "The Naked Gun" for
pretty much the same reason I loved the Three Stooges or Bugs Bunny
cartoons. Even as an adult, I appreciate unsubtle cartoon humor when it
is handled effectively. As long as it makes me laugh, who cares that
it's not "sophisticated"? For example, the scene where Lt. Drebin
breaks into a building and tries to be as quiet as possible, but then
inadvertently sets off a player piano, is masterfully filmed.
Thus, "The Naked Gun" is farce as much as it is satire. As I grew
older, I would gain a greater appreciation for the one-liners, like
"You take a chance getting up in the morning, crossing the street or
sticking your face in a fan." To be sure, many of these jokes are dumb.
They're supposed to be. That's the whole point. What I understood even
at age eleven was that the movie was essentially playing games with the
audience. When Lt. Drebin looks in a drawer and says "bingo," I knew
immediately that the drawer would reveal a bingo board. I was used to
this sort of humor, because I'd seen it in the earlier Zucker-Abrams
films, where the jokes had a definite logic to them, and trying to
predict them in advance was part of the fun. They have far more to do
with audience anticipation than with trying to make us laugh at bad
puns.
The modern spoof films have forgotten all this. They've forgotten that
making a good spoof requires a measure of invention, even if much of
the plot is ripped off from elsewhere. Car chases may not be original,
but "The Naked Gun" is, as far as I know, the first film in which the
chase is conducted by a student driver. This type of cleverness is
largely absent from the modern spoofs, which assume that they have no
reason to be creative when their ideas are based broadly on other
films. They've forgotten that the most effective way to make fun of a
cliché is by coming up with an ingenious twist. Even the characters in
films like these matter, and Lt. Drebin is crafted in the grand
tradition of other inept lawmen like Inspector Clousseau. This is what
gives the film its own personal stamp that makes it more than an
exercise in movie references.
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