Leslie Nielsen was blessed with a dramatic voice. His rich, deep baritone projects an air of superiority and power and so The Zucker Brothers, David and Jerry and their partner Jim Abrahams used him as the ultimate exemplar of authority gone stupid, first to great effect in the classic AIRPLANE! (1980) and then to perfection in THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF THE POLICE SQUAD! The world around him is silly but the deadpan Nielsen always remains stoic. He asks a date if he can slip into something more comfortable and changes from one crisp, dark suit into another. The joke is Nielsen is never in on the joke.

THE NAKED GUN was born from the ashes of a rejected television series named POLICE SQUAD! Each week Nielsen's Lt. Frank Drebin would solve a ridiculous case that made little sense to anyone but the Zuckers and Abrahams; each week also featured a guest-star like William Shatner getting mowed down in the opening credits. POLICE SQUAD! was simultaneously smarter and dumber than any other television show of the decade. In one episode, two characters arrange to have a conversation in "The Japanese Garden" which is depicted as a large space filled with Japanese people standing inside oversized pots. The show lasted six of the funniest television half hours ever, before it was cancelled because, I imagine, it made everything else on television look bad in comparison.

In the big-screen version, Drebin (whose rank in the department fluctuates at random, often in mid-sentence) is charged with protecting Queen Elizabeth on a trip through Los Angeles. Meanwhile Frank’s partner Nordberg (O.J. Simpson) gets shot dozens of times in an undercover operation on the harbor; luckily the bullets missed every vital organ, and salt water preserved him until he was found. When Drebin and his boss Capt. Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) visit him in the hospital, Nordberg tries desperately to tell Frank the information he uncovered before he was shot, and Frank thinks he's just looking to get some heroin ("That's a pretty tall order Nordberg. You're going to need to give me a couple of weeks on that one.").

The Zuckers and Abrahams were gifted comedians who they saw their world in a way that transformed the seemingly ordinary into the patently absurd. They saw the great but eccentric thrillers of director Don Siegel and realized that only the actors kept the scenes serious; so they reused whole scenes from DIRTY HARRY and TELEFON almost line for line, changing only the deliveries to make them comedic. They drove down the highway, saw the twin reactors at the nuclear power plant in San Onofre with the small protuberances at the top, realized they looked remarkably like breasts, and built a gag around them. As THE NAKED GUN begins, Frank has returned from a trip aboard, where he has tried to forget a woman who left him for an Olympic gymnast. It didn't help, he says, "everywhere I look something reminds me of her." Cut to a shot of the breast silos.

Frank gets the old flame out of his mind by meeting Jane (Priscilla Presley) who works for real estate magnate Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban), a suspect in Nordberg's shooting. Jane is the perfect woman; she enjoys vigorous but safe sex, comedies like PLATOON, and has a really nice beaver (she keeps it stuffed on a shelf in her office). Presley was a great co-star, selling every punchline and remaining totally egoless about poking fun at herself. She enters the film like a classic femme fatale, posing seductively at the top of a spiral staircase. She trips, falls, and regains her sultry composure without missing a beat.

Many of the comedies that shaped my sense of humor have not aged well (The less said about ACE VENTURA: WHEN NATURE CALLS the better), but THE NAKED GUN is still fresh and funny. The film builds to a sequence at a baseball game, where Frank impersonates an opera singer (and gives only bad performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" in history funnier than Roseanne's) and an umpire. It brought me to tears as a child, and it still makes me laugh; Drebin showboating and dancing the crowd when he realizes that they’ll cheer if he calls a strike, Drebin patting down the players crotches searching for a weapon, Drebin throwing a pile full of balls into the air to prevent a key out from occurring.

Through it all, Nielsen remained the ignorant calm at the center of his own blissful storm. There is something inherently funny about his ability to remain unfazed by even the strangest of occurrences, to bear down and grimace with intensity as the world around him devolves into a BENNY HILL episode. Throughout the 1990s, Nielsen appeared in a series of similarly toned exaggerated comedies, even joining forces with Mel Brooks for a spoof of DRACULA. They did not work because as gifted as a comedian as he could be, Nielsen was best when he wasn't being outwardly funny. Dracula, or Dick Steele in SPY HARD or Ryan Harrison in WRONGFULLY ACCUSSED were silly characters in silly movies. Lt. Frank Drebin was a tough-as-nails, hard-boiled dispenser of justice. It just so happened that directors were big fans of gigantic metallic boobies.

IF YOU LIKED THE NAKED GUN, CHECK OUT: TOP SECRET! (1984), the ZAZ crew’s forgotten gem, probably because the genre its spoofing, Elvis movies, has largely been forgotten itself. Still, a great performance from Val Kilmer, and some of the all-time great movie taglines including “Don’t Tell Anyone,” “A Film,” and “Movie? What movie?”

THE BAD

I took an entrepreneurship class in high school. One class we were treated to a guest lecturer, a woman who worked for Procter & Gamble, who she spoke about the perils and promise of creating and selling innovative new products. As her example, she spoke of a product she was working on at the time, a pleasant smelling spray that contained little cleaning value. You sprayed it on your carpet and your carpet smelled clean. The class later agreed that this was a stupid product with little future.

That product was Febreze, which now has its own website, and even its own online "community" where customers can share their favorite Febreze stories. The moral is no product is too strange that it can't succeed of marketed properly and therefore Vapoorize, the product at the center of the festering comedy ENVY — comedy only in the theoretical sense, of course — could possibly succeed. The movie does not, but the product could.

Vapoorize is an aerosol spray that dissolves dog crap. No one including its inventors knows how it works, which prompts a relentless assault of "Where does the poo go?" jokes. It is not funny the first time, and it is more not funny the eighth time, and it is downright insulting the twelfth time. If you'll pardon the pun, who gives a shit where it goes? Why does the movie want us to consider how Vapoorize works? As an audience we want to be believe the product works, though the film's hokey digital effects are utterly unconvincing. One question leads to more questions, and since this movie is as funny as pictures of tsunami devastation, our brains are free to ponder them at length. Does it only work on dog dung or can it be used to treat other kinds of feces? Does the state of the refuse (liquid versus solid) impact Vapoorize's effectiveness?

The product could be anything. It is only a shit remover because poo is the most reliable source of juvenile comedy and, apparently, because a joke about where the shit goes after you remove it is the comedic equivalent of a diamond mine. At least turds have humorous potential; the movie's other big target is the desert food flan. The entire closing credits are devoted to flan jokes. That's idiotic. And besides, everybody knows crème brulee is way funnier than flan.

Jack Black plays a 3M factory worker who spews out the Vapoorize, Ben Stiller is his best friend and neighbor who pooh-poohs the idea when he has a chance to go into partnership on it, and then regrets his decision when Black becomes a multigozillionaire and he remains a working class schlub. Both actors are cast against type to poor effect. Stiller is at his best playing sweet, neurotic everymen or illogical narcissists, men who think far more of themselves than they deserve to. Here he's a whiner, Jack Black as a family man who works behind a desk is simply antithetical to his entire star persona. A movie earnestly about the shifting power dynamics in a relationship could be fascinating (and maybe even funny), but ENVY cops out; it ambles into one dead-end subplot after another (i.e. Ben Stiller kills a horse, Ben Stiller buries horse, Ben Stiller hides horses, Ben Stiller digs up horse, Ben Stiller transports horse, and so on).

In one of his “I’ll do anything if the money’s good” roles, Christopher Walken nearly saves the film then sinks it even further. He plays “The J-Man” who encounters Stiller’s character at his lowest point and becomes his cheerleader, then an additional antagonist when he refuses to go away. Walken’s performance art delivery, which suggest someone reading dialogue that has been translated into another language and then back into English, puts a little snap into lines like, “Ma’am your husband has the back of a coal miner, I know because I mined coal.” But he won’t go away; a little Walken wackiness goes a long way.

With Stiller, Black, Walken, and director Barry Levinson (who, with credits ranging from BUGSY to TOYS to WAG THE DOG to SPHERE, may have the most inconsistent filmography of any working Hollywood director), talented individuals all, produced one big heaping pile of poop. Too bad there isn’t a spray that could dissolve the painful memories of watching it from my head. Hmmm, I wonder if I drank that bottle of Febreze I’ve got under the sink…

INSTEAD OF ENVY, CHECK OUT: DODGEBALL, A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY (2004), which is far funnier than it has any right to be. Watch through the closing credits to see a brief gag infinitely more entertaining than anything in ENVY.

THE UGLY

Some people (like myself, for instance) will do anything for a laugh. William Castle would do anything for a scream, and also for a dollar. No one would go so far — and spend so little — to scare the pants off an audience. During his most successful string of horror-thrillers in the late 1950's and early 1960's, he carted out one elaborate gimmick after another. For MACABRE, he offered insurance policies for audience members who died of fright. In the original HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, he hung skeletons from the theater ceiling and rigged them to spring on viewers at key moments. In THE TINGLER, he created perhaps his greatest gimmick; he actually rigged theater seats with electrical buzzers, and literally shocked people.

The shocks make sense within the context of the movie, though admittedly, the context of the movie does not make sense within the context of the movie. Vince Price plays Dr. Warren Chapin, a coroner studying fear. "There's a force in all of us that science knows very little about," he tells his assistant (Darryl Hickman). "A force of fear." Chapin examines the bodies of people who have died of fright, and finds their spines crushed by this mysterious force. He claims that his colleagues would laugh at him if he wrote that on the death certificate, so he puts down "death by heart failure" which sounds like a case of gross misconduct by a coroner, but what do I know. Turns out crazy Chapin is right. Something is killing people that are scared, a creature that he names "The Tingler" that appears inside people who are scared, and crushes their spines until they die. This idea is totally absurd, and Castle and his screenwriters create a set of convenient plot twists to explain this unbelievable little creature. How is it created? Oh, well, tinglers are microscopic organism that feed on fear. Why aren't tinglers found inside the body every person that dies fright? Oh, well, tinglers need fear to survive so when the person dies and the fear disappears, so do they. How, then, is a tingler able to live on outside of the body when Chapin surgically removes it from a corpse? Oh well, it's a symbiotic relationship and so once it is removed from the body the tingler simply cannot be killed. Let's not soft-peddle the issue: this script makes Jessica Simpson look like a poet laureate.

It doesn't matter. The tingler creature is a hideous beast, first revealed in a great scene from behind a surgical curtain, so its appearance is displayed bit by bit in silhouette, and then moments later, slimy and wriggling in Price's hands. Once the tingler is out of the bag, Castle shamelessly and provocatively manipulates his audience into a lather; even without the onboard electricity, THE TINGLER is a hoot and a scare. After Chapin looses a tingler from its human host, it escapes from its cage (a film canister, in a great Castle touch) and sneaks into a nearby movie theater. Castle then cuts from Price's search to a totally black screen, with Price on the soundtrack instructing the audience, "Scream! Scream for your lives!" Presumably, here's where those electrical shock would course through the audience's ass. Castle even included some bloodcurdling screams in the film just to coax them out of the audience. If I could have seen any movie in its original context, I would probably pick THE TINGLER.

Castle is remembered as a shyster and a showman, and neither title is unearned. But if a director with a better reputation working in a more highbrow genre experimented with direct address as he did, they would be hailed a genius. By reaching out from the movie screen to touch, jostle, and terrorize viewers, he anticipated modern amusement park attractions. He brought ingenuity and creativity to one of the cinema's most repetitive and stale genres. Even the fear-feeding creature storyline is fresh — if only because no one else would think that a creature eating fear of off people's spinal columns is even remotely acceptable as a premise for horror. It's schlock, but finely crafted schlock. Good for a scare. And a buck.

IF YOU LIKED THE TINGLER, CHECK OUT: DRACULA, THE DIRTY OLD MAN (1969), a poorly made sexploitation horror movie, with a gag soundtrack added in post-production. Dracula sounds like an old Jewish man, kvetching about how he can’t get laid anymore. Truly funny.