26. THE THOUSANDS: This movie’s title must have a 4-digit number in it.
Financed with German tax-shelter money, shot on green-screen soundstages in Montreal, starring an aging legend in his last parody-movie starring role and featuring an international cast where half the actors look like they were dubbed by someone standing in a different room, this is 2001: A Space Travesty.
Directed by Allan A. Goldstein, who had experience with older stars after making Death Wish 5: The Face of Death, and co-written by Francesco Lucente, Alan Shearman (Cheech Marin’s Shrimp On the Barbie) and Vince Di Clemente, this has Nielsen as Marshal Richard “Dick” Dix—a bumbling special agent who starts the film by foiling a fast-food hostage situation before being dispatched to Vegan, a Moon base run by cloning masterminds, where there’s a conspiracy to clone the President of the United States (played by a Bill Clinton lookalike, though never named). Along the way, Dix teams up with Cassandra Menage (French pop star Ophélie Winter) and Captain Valentino DiPasquale (Italian comedy staple Ezio Greggio, who also co-produced).
What follows is an endless barrage of alien gags and fart jokes, a subplot involving Dr. Griffin Pratt (Peter Egan) and a runaway toupee, a climax set at a Three Tenors concert where the performers sing Village People songs, and an alien double-cross featuring an undercover extraterrestrial (Alexandra Kamp).
Yet this movie is strangely ahead of its time. In the opening scene, Leslie Nielsen’s character delivers a line that hits wildly different today: “It was one of those days you never forget. I’d arrested Osmond Bin Laden at a Lakers-Knicks game.” The film hit Japanese theaters in late 2000, nearly a full year before September 11th. Watching a slapstick movie casually toss around Osam-a Bin Laden gags in the year 2000 feels like a temporal anomaly.
Despite a $30 million price tag, the movie struggled to find a major US theatrical distributor. Canadian distributor Equinox Films held back on marketing, waiting for an American push that never came. As a result, it quietly bombed across North America and ended up straight-to-video in most territories—making it Leslie Nielsen’s final starring role in a full-fledged parody film before he shifted into supporting roles in the Scary Movie franchise. When it landed in Hungary, local distributors dropped the original title and went straight for the cash grab, calling it Csupasz Pisztoly az Űrben—which literally translates to Naked Gun in Space.
I love Leslie Nielsen, and there are times here that remind me of that love, but there are also times that make me sad. But hey, you go with the roles you’re offered.
You can watch this on Tubi.
