The Naked Gun returns this weekend hoping to relaunch a long-dormant subgenre with Scary Movie, Spinal Tap and Spaceballs sequels to follow
The Naked Gun, a sequel/reboot to the old movie series of the same name, represents the first of its kind in a long time. No, not a legacy sequel, nor a Liam Neeson movie; the in-demand Irish actor still does two or three of those a year. Like its predecessors, The Naked Gun is a spoof – part of a comedic subgenre with astonishing versatility, in that it can lay claim to some of the very best and very worst comedies of all time. Maybe that’s why these movies, despite relatively low budgets and decent success rates, will sometimes disappear for years at a time. Now, in a period when a pure comedy hasn’t crossed the $100m mark in the US in almost a decade, The Naked Gun seems to be leading a revival. A sequel to the rock-doc spoof This Is Spinal Tap arrives next month, follow-ups to Scary Movie and the Mel Brooks Star Wars spoof Spaceballs are on the way, and there have even been whispers of a fourth Austin Powers film.
The leader of the latest comeback has a connection to some high-water marks: the original Naked Gun, yes, but more importantly 1980’s Airplane!, a feature-length spoof of the then-popular disaster movies from comic film-makers David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker. ZAZ, as the team was known, didn’t invent the idea of parodying familiar genres in a barrage of intentional (and subverted) cliches, sight gags, puns and other stupid-clever jokes. But Airplane! took on movies like Airport with such a deadpan density, and such a shockingly high hit rate, that it wrested the spoof crown from previous king, Mel Brooks (whose Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles are still standard-bearers for loving genre parody).