Naked Gun

"Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult" culminates with a grand comedy finale at the Academy Awards, a device obviously designed to coincide with Monday's Oscar telecast. Police Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) impersonates Phil Donahue in order to gain access to the stage and prevent an unwary presenter from opening an envelope containing a bomb. His antics turn the awards ceremony into an embarrassing spectacle, which of course it already is. What happens on stage is never as mortifying as the events of the actual broadcasts.

"Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult" massacred the Academy Awards weekend box-office competition with a $13.2 million opening gross that was more than double the $5 million collected by second-ranked "Guarding Tess. " The third in the popular "Police Squad" spinoff movies, "Naked Gun 33 1/ 3" opened much bigger than the first, which held up $9.3 million back in December 1988, but not nearly as well as the second, which took in nearly $21 million in June 1991. Another new comedy, "Monkey Trouble," scored $4.5 million to grab third place, and Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," placed in 1,246 theaters to take advantage of its Oscar-favorite status, was fourth with $4.3 million.

In National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon I the ammunition consists mostly of dumb-dumb bullets. Unfortunately, most of them are blanks. There are moments of amusement and comic invention in director Gene Quintano's movie, and you can at least say that the jokes - good, bad and mostly indifferent - come in fusillades. The key problem with this weapon is its target. There are spoofs of Sharon Stone's sans panty contribution to Basic Instinct and slaps at assorted other cop movies, but the main object of parody is the hugely successful Lethal Weapon series.

When the Oscars lurch into their fourth hour Monday night, an Arab terrorist bomb timed to detonate while someone is offering a teary thank-you to his or her agent's mother might strike more than a few stupefied viewers as a pretty good idea. In Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, the moment for the planned explosion arrives long after the film has run out of ammunition. The producers of the third installment were right to put another fraction in the title, because the many fans of the first two comedies in the series can expect only partial satisfaction.

Move over, Eddie Murphy. There's a new cop titillating the Beverly Hills vicinity. He's mean, more-or-less lean, a scream and he's not entirely on the beam. He's that master of comedy, Leslie Nielsen. No, Nielsen wasn't a member of an early 1980s "Saturday Night Live" cast. But that's one of the few TV shows he hasn't worked on. Nielsen has made more than 1,000 small-screen appearances in 38 years, mostly as one kind of tough guy or another. His buttoned-down dramatic image was so indelible that the filmmaking team of Jerry and David Zucker and Jim Abrahams made repeated fun of it in their smash 1980 satire, "Airplane!"

The dignified, white-haired man holding court in a Manhattan hotel suite has got his psychological patter down cold. He doesn't even lose his cool when an associate pours him a cup of coffee and the lid of the pot falls into the china cup. "I think we select occupations that lead us on our search," he says, sipping a fresh cup of joe. "And often, (we select) ones that leave you unsure as to whether to open the next door. These doors usually lead to who you are - or who you once were as a child.

To escape being caught searching the villain's office, our hero has to climb out a window and inch his way across a narrow ledge high above the street. You've seen that scene a dozen times before but - guaranteed - never quite the way it is done in "The Naked Gun - From the Files of the Police Squad. " Our hero naturally looks for something protruding to grab hold of, and on this building, decorated by life-sized figures of Greek gods and goddesses, what sticks out - way out - is a god's sexual organ . . . Both our hero and the movie make the most of this.

Rosie O'Donnell is as bad as gold. Golden Raspberries, that is. The Razzies razzed the actress with a triple nomination as worst movie actress for 1994. The nominees are: WORST PICTURE: "Color of Night," "North," "On Deadly Ground," "The Specialist," "Wyatt Earp. " WORST ACTOR: Kevin Costner, "Wyatt Earp"; Macaulay Culkin, "Getting Even with Dad" and "Richie Rich"; Steven Seagal, "On Deadly Ground"; Sylvester Stallone, "The Specialist," and Bruce Willis, "Color of Night" and "North.

Scary Movie 3 comes by way of David Zucker, who, along with his brother Jerry and Jim Abraham, are responsible for the Mad Magazine-style parodies Airplane! and Naked Gun. So it's no surprise that Naked Gun's leading dunderhead, Leslie Nielsen, shows up in the midst of Scary Movie's shameless string of send-ups - as a distinguished-looking dunderheaded president of the United States. Zucker and his writers have conflated the lethal-video gimmick of the horror hit The Ring with the aliens-among-us crop desecration of Signs to come up with what could loosely be described as a plot.

SMALL WORLD, NEW HAIR. Have you noticed prosecutor Marcia Clark's new do? Gone is the just-out-of-the-shower look, replaced with a short, sculpted bob. Concerned that she wasn't televising well, Clark is getting a ready-for- prime-time makeover courtesy of Kris Jenner, said the New York Post's Cindy Adams. Jenner is one of the actors in the O.J. drama who never seems far from center stage. She was a member of Nicole Brown Simpson's Gang of Five, her closest buddies in the months before the murders, and is married to former Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner.

Beneath the good-natured retro silliness of "Black Dynamite" is something smart and new. This re-creation of an early 1970s blaxploitation movie is vaguely in the style of an Abrahams-Zucker ("Airplane!," "Naked Gun") or Wayans Bros. genre send-up, but it's crucially different. "Black Dynamite" is a canny and often sincere replica of a movie in the "Shaft" or "Dolemite" tradition. If a print turned up on "The Antiques Roadshow," experts might have a hard time determining whether it was an actual period piece or expert reproduction.

Steve Carell had to come to terms with two things on the set of "Get Smart. " First, he wasn't there to do an impression of Don Adams. Second, his co-star Anne Hathaway could outrun him handily. In six-inch heels. As Maxwell Smart, the TV spymaster originated by Adams in the 1960s, Carell gets to bring Smart's shoe phone back to life and utter classic lines like, "Missed it by that much. " But his cardinal rule on the set was to avoid impersonating Adams. "I figured there was no way to improve upon what he had done [in the TV series]

What do you get when you mix up Saw, The Grudge, The Village, and War of the Worlds - and then throw in a little Brokeback Mountain and Million Dollar Baby? You get Scary Movie 4, a throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks onslaught of potty jokes, puns, celebrity cameos, J-horror, and j-high sophistication and wit. You also get laughs, but not nearly as many as you'd hoped. Overseen by David Zucker, The Airplane!/Naked Gun parodist who took over the Scary Movie franchise with No. 3, SM-4 brings back Anna Faris as the nubile nincompoop Cindy Campbell, sent to take care of an infirm hag (Cloris Leachman)

Way back in the '80s, before Batman Forever and The Island of Dr. Moreau, Val Kilmer was funny. For proof, check out Top Secret!, which stars Kilmer as an American rock-and-roll star on tour in East Germany. The underrated Jim Abrahams-Zucker brothers spy spoof, recently released on DVD, has it all: stupid songs (including "Skeet Surfing," a take on various Beach Boys classics); parodies of films such as The Blue Lagoon and The Great Escape; and several of-the-time swipes at the Ford Pinto and the masculine builds of Soviet-bloc female athletes.

Scary Movie 3 comes by way of David Zucker, who, along with his brother Jerry and Jim Abraham, are responsible for the Mad Magazine-style parodies Airplane! and Naked Gun. So it's no surprise that Naked Gun's leading dunderhead, Leslie Nielsen, shows up in the midst of Scary Movie's shameless string of send-ups - as a distinguished-looking dunderheaded president of the United States. Zucker and his writers have conflated the lethal-video gimmick of the horror hit The Ring with the aliens-among-us crop desecration of Signs to come up with what could loosely be described as a plot.

Take your average WIP caller and rotisserie-league stat freak, multiply him by Ted Bundy, and you have Gil Renard. "I'm more entranced than the average fan," says Renard, an insanely devoted San Francisco Giants buff, played by Robert De Niro with his acting engine set on Maximum Psycho - a high rev somewhere between "Taxi Driver" and "Cape Fear. " Yes, Gil's a little more entranced than the average fan. You notice it in the way he tramples on his own son on his way to catch a pop foul at the ballpark.

Rosie O'Donnell is as bad as gold. Golden Raspberries, that is. The Razzies razzed the actress with a triple nomination as worst movie actress for 1994. The nominees are: WORST PICTURE: "Color of Night," "North," "On Deadly Ground," "The Specialist," "Wyatt Earp. " WORST ACTOR: Kevin Costner, "Wyatt Earp"; Macaulay Culkin, "Getting Even with Dad" and "Richie Rich"; Steven Seagal, "On Deadly Ground"; Sylvester Stallone, "The Specialist," and Bruce Willis, "Color of Night" and "North.

SMALL WORLD, NEW HAIR. Have you noticed prosecutor Marcia Clark's new do? Gone is the just-out-of-the-shower look, replaced with a short, sculpted bob. Concerned that she wasn't televising well, Clark is getting a ready-for- prime-time makeover courtesy of Kris Jenner, said the New York Post's Cindy Adams. Jenner is one of the actors in the O.J. drama who never seems far from center stage. She was a member of Nicole Brown Simpson's Gang of Five, her closest buddies in the months before the murders, and is married to former Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner.

Listen to just a few of the off-the-cuff comments I've heard about the continuing O.J. chronicle: "The media has already tried and hung the guy. What if he didn't do it?" "The brother was set up!" "Women get treated like that all of the time. Why are people so shocked?" "What could she have done to make him do that?" So many thoughts. The Saga of O.J. has something for everyone: blood and gore for the "life's a horror movie" crew; love-gone-wrong for TV talk show devotees; an improbable-but-evolving conspiracy angle for the blackness- equals-innocence posse.

"I think he's probably rolled around in his grave a couple of times. " - Priscilla Presley, on what Elvis would think of her "Naked Gun" acting career STARS GETTING BOOKED - BY COPS So what's going on with names in fame and the law? Yesterday, we reported that Wesley Snipes had an add-on to his sheet . . . a 120 mph cycle ride with a Florida state trooper trying to play catch-up for 30 miles . . . ending in a bust when Snipes flipped from his bike. He's OK, except for the citation for reckless driving.