Dare to Be Stupid

It feels strangely appropriate that The Naked Gun and The Toxic Avenger should come to disc on the same day. They’re both beloved ’80s properties – one a major-studio comedy franchise, the other an X-rated splatter comedy from two guys who called themselves a studio – reinvented for contemporary audiences who’ve grown up with fond memories of the brands.

And both of them have scenes where the hero rips a guy’s arm off, which is kind of a weird coincidence. Let’s start with the one where you don’t expect that.

The Naked Gun is a movie that generates massive goodwill from the jump, with Liam Neeson somehow the perfect choice to inherit the role of LAPD Police Squad maniac Frank Drebin from the late Leslie Nielsen. Like Nielsen, Neeson isn’t known for his comedy chops – though he does have them – and was perceived as a stoic, authoritative character actor even before his 21^st century renaissance as an action hero.

But as we’ve seen in small glimpses over the years, Neeson will jump at the chance to play a weirdo – hosting Saturday Night Live, guesting on Life’s Too Short – and he’s able to channel Nielsen’s stone-faced absurdity in a way that makes it his own. He’s also willing to play Drebin (Jr.) as a whiny, self-hating idiot in a way that Nielsen never attempted, and that lets this Naked Gun really lean into the idea of criticizing authority figures as entitled, swaggering idiots drawn to abusing their power to compensate for their emotional and intellectual shortcomings.

Not that Drebin Jr. – and his long-suffering captain, Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) – aren’t the good guys, or at least better guys than really bad guys like scheming tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston), who’s plotting to reduce most of humanity to barbarism in order for himself and his elite pals to rebuild society in their own image. With the help of femme fatale Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), Frank must expose Cane’s plot and keep Los Angeles from devolving into brutality. If only he could stop eating chili dogs on the way to work.

In the hands of director Akiva Schaeffer and his co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, The Naked Gun is a wall-to-wall frenzy of dopey gags, deadpan non-sequiturs and preposterous fight scenes, all in the service of making us laugh in the moment. There’s a through-line about the arrogance of stupid, self-centered white men that’s pretty hard to miss, but the movie doesn’t try to be any deeper than that; it just celebrates its own boneheaded legacy with such joy that it’s impossible to resist. It just wants to be funny, and honestly, at this point in time that’s something we sorely need. Also, the snowman thing really is as weird and entertaining as you’ve heard.

Paramount’s special edition doesn’t have an audio commentary – which is a bit of a letdown, given how funny and observant Schaffer was on the Hot Rad track two decades ago – but the writer-director contributes plenty of thoughts in multiple featurettes that explore the production without getting, you know, too serious about it.

“A Legacy of Laughter” lets Schaffer and his cast talk about their love for the Leslie Nielsen originals, noting the deliberate homages references and offering some interesting details about the snowman montage, which Schaffer says is almost identical to the bullet points he typed into his phone one night. And producer Seth MacFarlane turns up to admit that the extent of his contribution was the idea that Liam Neeson should play the new Frank Drebin.

Neeson and Anderson get the spotlight in “Son of a (Naked) Gun” and “The Funny Femme Fatale,” saluting their ability to slip into the stone-faced idiocy of the Police Squad! world – and their respective facilities with stunt work and bombshell poses, respectively.

“The Really Unusual Suspects” lets Schaffer discuss the joy of picking up the ZAZ baton of casting dramatic actors to play bonehead comic roles without blinking – Danny Huston, Kevin Durand, even Paul Walter Hauser – while “On Set of a Set Within a Set That’s in a Set” celebrates the big Mission: Impossible set-reveal joke. And then there’s “Dropping the Balls,” about the UFC match that echoes the Dodger Stadium climax of the original Naked Gun, with co-star Huston having a grand old time explaining the stunt that gives the featurette its name.

The best bits are hiding in the collections of deleted scenes and outtakes, which offer dozens of alternate gags and trimmed comic beats that are just as much fun as the stuff that stayed in. There’s even a little more time with the snowman. An embarrassment of riches, this disc.

Macon Blair’s reboot of The Toxic Avenger doesn’t have quite as much of a supplementary suite – the downside of making a tiny little indie without the resources of a major Hollywood studio. But the movie makes the most of its limitations, just as Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz did when they made the film that launched the Tromaverse four decades ago.

One cannot argue for the original Toxic Avenger as a good movie, exactly; it was a splattery, almost rancid thing, an exercise in bad taste about a nerdy janitor who gets turned into a superhero by some bullies and runs around killing bullies as messily as possible, while also falling in love with a hot blind woman (Andree Maranda) because that’s something Kaufman and Herz vaguely remember from comic books. It’s slapdash bordering on amateurish, but of course it became a cult hit in midnight screenings and on home video, spawning three increasingly ridiculous sequels and a terrible animated TV series. But people love the character, so an update was inevitable. And that’s where hiring Macon Blair made all the difference.

Blair is the guy who broke out in Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin as a sad-sack avenging angel, and has spent the ensuing decade-plus turning up in all sorts of interesting projects, as well as writing, producing and even directing his own stuff, including the Melanie Lynskey-Elijah Wood thriller I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. He most recently directed a few episodes of Sterlin Harjo’s The Lowdown, in which he also had a small but reliably funny role. And a few years ago, he shot his Toxie movie.

Blair wanted to make a different sort of Toxic Avenger, one with real actors doing actual acting and a story that was more than just some slapped-together nonsense – though there’s still plenty of nonsense in the environs of St. Roma’s Village, where hapless janitor Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage) gets mixed up in an industrial-contamination scandal and thrown into a sludge pond of chemical runoff by a monstercore band moonlighting as hired killers.

Emerging transformed as the Toxic Avenger, Winston – played in a creature suit by Luisa Guerreiro – now seeks revenge on his attackers, while also trying to care for his neurodivergent stepson Wade (Jacob Tremblay). But Winston’s super-powered condition has attracted the attention of local industrialist and health freak Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon) … whose brother Fritz (Elijah Wood) is responsible for the mixup that got Winston Toxified in the first place.

There are many villains to smash, sure, and Winston will eventually team up with J.J. Doherty (Taylour Paige), the whistleblower Fritz’ goons were actually supposed to kill, but the weird heart of the movie is in the contrasting relationships of Winston and Wade, who are nice people trying to form a family after the death of Wade’s mom, and Bob and Fritz, two very weird brothers whose issues prevent them from ever really communicating. Blair treats them as real people in the midst of all the bloody, silly mayhem, and it works way better than it ought to.

The actors get what he's going for, and deliver with enthusiasm – Julia Davis, as Bob’s overly committed assistant, is a standout – and the seamless fusion of Guerreiro’s physical performance and Dinklage’s overdubbed dialogue creates a hero we can invest in, as opposed to the lumpen latex thing of the earlier movies. Honestly, the most jarring thing about this Toxic Avenger is seeing Jacob Tremblay as a gangly, baby-faced kid – and if that wasn’t enough to remind you the film was shot in the summer of 2021, check out all the COVID masks in the behind-the-scenes footage.

Speaking of which: Blair’s engaging audio commentary anchors the special features, opening with a story about adding a little voiceover from Dinklage to the first scene because test audiences didn’t understand a film called The Toxic Avenger wasn’t intended to be taken 100% seriously – and invoking the original Naked Gun four minutes in. Some commentaries are scholarly, some are enthusiastic; this one is just plain fun.

The disc also includes three featurettes: A making-of that finds the entire cast and crew positively reveling in the experience of making a Toxic Avenger movie – the script, the effects, the sets, the blessing of St. Kaufman of Troma – and offers some invaluable glimpses of Guerreiro in the Toxie suit on-set, where we can notice the British actor maintained her American accent even when the cameras weren’t rolling, the better to match Dinklage’s own delivery. (She describes the Toxie makeup as “quite close-fitting.”)

Also included are a 15-minute excerpt from last year’s 40^th anniversary celebration of the Toxic Avenger franchise on the Horror 101 with Dr. AC YouTube show – you can see the whole thing here, it has puppets – and “Toxic Shock: A 21^st Century Hero” celebrates all that is Toxie, with clips from all of the movies and Troma veteran Tiffany Shepis turning up to deliver an enthusiastic monologue about the character. For fans only? Yeah, probably. But this is a Toxic Avenger movie; the fans are gonna find it.

Also arriving on disc this week are Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale and Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, which both aim to revive properties that are well past their sell-by date.

I understand the appeal of escapist costume drama in Our Current Moment with regards to another Downton movie, but Julian Fellowes has nothing left to say about the Crawleys – if indeed he ever truly did – and the death of Maggie Smith leaves a void that cannot be papered over. At least it looks expensive.

As for Tap II, which finds Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer grudgingly getting back the band back together for a movie about grudgingly getting back the band back together … you know, it doesn’t have anything to say either. After decades of rockumentaries about aging bands looking back on their glory days, there are no jokes left to be told, and everybody just looks so tired.

It’s also weird to see a Spinal Tap sequel that refuses to acknowledge these characters were introduced as aging has-beens forty years ago. Anyway, it’s on disc now and it’s weird that there are no special features; at least The Grand Finale offers commentary by director Simon Curtis and co-star Elizabeth McGovern, four fluffy featurettes and the victory-lap TV special “Downton Abbey Celebrates The Grand Finale.” Talk about giving the fans what they want.

The Naked Gun and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale are now available in 4K/Blu-ray combos and BD-only editions from Paramount Home Video and Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, respectively. The Toxic Avenger is available on Blu-ray from VVS Films in Canada and Cinedigm in the US, which also offers a 4K combo release. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is on 4K and Blu-ray from Decal Releasing. And congratulations to Dave Lamb, winner of the Downton Abbey giveaway! Your 4K combo edition is on its way courtesy of UPHE. Do enjoy it.

Up next: More new releases, and I’m still working my way through Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future trilogy. And don’t forget to upgrade that subscription so you don’t miss tomorrow's What’s Worth Watching newsletter! I’m tackling Pluribus!