THE screwball comedy The Naked Gun (World, 9.35pm), or to give it its full title The Naked Gun: From The Files Of Police Squad! is noteworthy because it stars a man some of you may have heard of. O.J. Simpson was having better times in 1988, when the film was made. He plays Nordberg and is difficult to miss.
Everything about The Naked Gun is difficult to miss. It is a stream of verbal and visual gags that come so fast you will barely have time to laugh. Many of the gags are funny, some are corny and others are truly awful.
The opening scenes are inspired: a camera mounted behind the blue flashing light on top of a police car drives down city streets, into a car-wash, through a building, down a corridor and finally into a women's locker room. Nobody said The Naked Gun was a thinking person's movie. If you are politically correct, spend the evening watering your organic muesli plants instead.
The plot, for the film does have one, be it as flimsy as Sharon Stone's knicker elastic, is taken from the short-lived television show Police Squad. This was written by the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker production team, who also wrote the film, having made a huge splash with Airplane! a few years earlier.
Leslie Nielsen reprises his role as bumbling police lieutenant Frank Drebin, who becomes embroiled in a case involving suave heroin smuggler Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban). Drebin falls for Ludwig's assistant (Priscilla Presley, star of Dallas, former wife of Elvis and now mother-in-law of Wacko Jacko), who is just as dim and clumsy as he is.
The sub-plot concerns an assassination attempt on the Queen, played by lookalike Jeanette Charles, during a visit to Los Angeles.