2001: A Space Travesty (2000)

Well, it was bound to happen one day: they finally made a movie that is not only an insult to comedy and an insult to parody films in general, but also an insult to Leslie Nielsen.

Leslie, as you may or may not know, is the patron saint of the parody film genre, ever since he underwent the greatest re-invention of any actor of his era.

At one time, Leslie Nielsen was a stoic, handsome leading man with a slew of serious films to his credit. By the Seventies, the parts were slow in coming and he wasn't getting any younger.

Oh, there were still movies every now and then, but Leslie was in danger of becoming a has-been - especially with credits like 1978's City On Fire and 1980's Prom Night.

It was about this time that he was (re)discovered by the film-making trio of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, who made their names in the comedy world by creating The Kentucky Fried Movie, a film that would forever change blackout skit comedy films. They were also the genius minds behind Airplane!, a parody itself of the Airport series. By casting Leslie in the part of a doctor on-board a doomed plane, he was given a chance to play a character as stoic and grim as any he had ever played before. This time, for laughs. And he got them, in spades.

This led to Leslie being cast in a woefully short-lived TV series also created by Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker entitled "Police Squad! (in COLOR)" as equally grim and determined police detective Frank Drebin. This also led to a series of three film spin-offs, known to the world as The Naked Gun series and also O.J. Simpson's finest hour.

By this time, Leslie was the go-to guy when it came to silly comedy, and he was cast in many many movies as a result. In fact, he found himself even more busy at this stage in life than he ever was when younger. Leslie Nielsen had made a name for himself in Hollywood, again.

There is, however, a law of averages in movies that goes like this: when you make a great volume of movies that are basically the same thing, not all of them are going to be good. And as far as Leslie goes, this can be proven by looking at titles like Spy Hard, Mr. Magoo and Wrongfully Accused.

Sad as it is, it occurs almost daily: typecasting is the worst thing that any actor can have done to them. It happened to Julia Roberts. It happened to John Cusack. Who can look at Kelsey Grammer and not think Frasier Crane? It happens more often than you might think, and it sure did happen to Leslie Nielsen. He will now, till his dying day, be typecast as the stoic old guy who can act goofy at a second's notice.

Which is probably how he got cast in the subject for today. But believe me: 2001: A Space Travesty would have been the worst film ever even if it had Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton in it. Why? Because this is a movie that takes dead horse-beating to a whole new level of grotesqueness.

It doesn't take Roger Ebert to figure that the title is a rip on 2001: A Space ODYSSEY, but the sad part is that they only touch on Stanley Kubrick's film for a couple of minutes before moving on to some of the most stupid, grade-school level humor ever seen outside of a grade school. This is like Porky's in Space, only without laughs. This is worse than letting someone with Tourette's Syndrome rewrite Spaceballs. It's like Pauly Shore's greatest (or worst) hits. It's...it's....

Wait a minute, wait a minute...this is going to turn into a slaughter if I don't stop for a second and take a deep breath. Okay, I'm back. Let me try and explain the basic outline of this beauty:

The US Marshall Service gets wind of a plot that the President of the United States (Bill Clinton in this case, which means a lot of saxophone jokes) is being held captive on a secret international moon base called Vegan and that he has been replaced on Earth by a clone. The Marshall Service immediately sends their best man to break the case: U.S. Marshall Richard 'Dick' Dix (ha). Along the way, he meets the beautiful yet mysterious Cassandra Menage (Ophelie Winter), the mysterious yet beautiful Dr. Uschi Künstler (Alexandra-Kamp Groeneveld) and the plain-old mysterious Dr. Griffin Pratt (Peter Egan). But not to worry: Dix also gets varying degrees of help from the goofball duo of Captain Valentino Di Pasquale (Ezio Greggio) and Lt. Bradford Shitzu (Pierre Edwards). Will Dix succeed? Will Dix fail? Will you care?

This thing was written by Alan Shearman, a name you may only recognize if you read the very last of the movie credits for films like The Incredible Shrinking Woman, Escape from New York, Jake Speed and Stoogemania. But he also wrote The Shrimp on the Barbie, Cheech Marin's magnum opus and proof that there was life after Born in East L.A.

Director Allan A. Goldstein has less than 30 films to his credit since 1979, but his biggest title to date has been Death Wish V: The Face of Death. That's right - in prep for a parody comedy, our director's most recognizable product was a latter-day Charles Bronson entry in a series he (and we) would rather have lived without. Talk about someone who ended up being typecast....

So, middling writing paired with lackluster direction. Great. Surely the acting efforts will pull the fat out of the fire.

Nielsen can mug with the best of them, and no one can make ridiculous situations plausible like he. But in a movie where he has to drop trou, hold women upside down and wear a fake beard with condoms stuck on it (no, I don't get that either), he unfortunately is stuck using a lot of comedy crutches in Travesty. The biggest impression I got from Leslie Nielsen, master farceur, is that he spends 85% of his time onscreen staring wide-eyed at his extra-terrestrial surroundings.

The women are pretty but also bland. In spite of the fact that Winter has dazzling beauty and Groeneveld has a dark mystique, neither one leaves much more of an impression than as window dressing.

Greggio puts on a variety of disguises and does more than his share of slapstick from beginning to end but this is a character for which a little goes a long way; unfortunately Greggio doesn't understand that concept and goes all-out, full throttle, as if Red Bull was his drink of choice.

The gags (if that is what these can be called) don't really make a lot of sense. Most of them come out of left field and not in an entertaining way, either. One scene in a prologue explains how, in the creation of the universe, some horrible anomalies were also created, then they show images of Dennis Rodman, Michael Jackson and rock group KISS (?) floating in outer space. Another explains how stars in the universe came to be, from the red giants to the white dwarfs - then a tiny man in a white nightgown is shown jumping around in a field of stars.

There are also a lot of jokes that involve body waste (par for the course in these movies), rude noises, lost toupees, occasional swearing, people (or animals or aliens) falling down, funny costumes and - an old favorite - clips from older movies cut in at random intervals throughout, and seemingly for no better reason than just to show people that the film editor was actually working.

To be perfectly honest, any attempts at comedy here are completely overwhelmed by the bizarre surroundings and overt multitude of alien creatures on the moonbase setting. There are more alien lifeforms here than on the Coruscant Senate floor. And it doesn't help your comedy if you're too busy looking at all the weird creatures doing whatever at the far side of the screen.

But maybe that was the idea after all - if you keep the screen busy enough, have enough aliens crowded into the frame and enough stupid sight gags and clumsy slapstick, maybe the viewer will fail to realize there's actually nothing going on anywhere else in your film.

Travesty is especially sad for Leslie Nielsen, since his involvement in this movie was purely for name recognition. Hey, Leslie Nielsen is in it, it's gotta be funny! And believe you me, movies have been sold to the general public on far less a selling point than that: Hey, it's snakes on a plane! Hey, it's Die Hard on a boat! Hey, Paris Hilton dies in this!

Even worse is the fact that these lower-end kind of movies will be the ones that Leslie Nielsen ends up best-remembered for.

Forbidden Planet and Tammy and the Bachelor are one thing.

Airplane! and The Naked Gun are another.

But 2001: A Space Travesty is altogether something else.

And not something good, either.

Something that ends up, coincidentally enough, wholly and completely alien.

Although I'm sure that it's something Charles Bronson would have completely sympathized with.