Film
Slapstick: Naked Gun marathon hosted by Lloyd Langford
- Director
- David Zucker, Peter Segal
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 253 mins
If you just can’t wait for January’s Slapstick Festival, head along to this curtain-raising marathon of mirth featuring all three Naked Gun flicks.
A spin-off from the curiously short-lived Police Squad TV series, the original 1988 Naked Gun saw the Airplane! Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team launch their most successful comic franchise, though the secret of its appeal owes as much to Leslie Nielsen’s superb deadpan bumbling and casual destruction as it does to a script bristling with verbal and visual gags. Nielsen plays the blithely incompetent lieutenant Frank Drebin, who’s initially called upon to investigate the shooting of a cop during a drugs bust. He then falls for Mr. Big’s assistant Jane (Priscilla Presley), who shares his extraordinary clumsiness. It all leads inexorably towards a set-piece finale at which the Queen of England (veteran lookalike Jeanette Charles) is threatened with assassination. But the Naked Gun flicks aren’t about plot so much as the incessant stream of jokes, which are often infantile and always hilarious. George Kennedy more than holds his own as Drebin’s sidekick and Nielsen’s straightman, Ricardo Montalban gives great villainy as the prime suspect, and there’s even some unintentional amusement to be gained from the appearance by the notorious OJ Simpson (who reprised his role in the two sequels) as the serially unfortunate Nordberg. Oh, and watch out for that nice beaver.
In Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear, Frank starts off by humiliating the First Lady at a White House function and then has his work cut out uncovering a conspiracy to influence the president’s energy policy. The plot’s unutterably stupid as usual, there’s lots of humour at the expense of George Bush (played by a very convincing lookalike), and enough right-on ecological sentiments to make you accept that all the bad jokes are in a good cause.
is needed now More than ever
The final film, Naked Gun 33 1/3: the Final Insult, sees Frank taking on a bunch of terrorists who plan to blow up the Academy Awards ceremony. Minor celebrities ahoy! Watch out for the Anna Nicole Smith transgender gag that they wouldn’t be allowed to get away with today.
The event will be hosted by comedian, Celebrity Mastermind winner and Naked Gun superfan Lloyd Langford and will culminate in a discussion with comedy historian Robert Ross, exploring the career of Leslie Nielsen and the writing/directing team of Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker and David Zucker
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