‘Weapon’: a Good Shot at a Spoof

In “National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1,” a burned-out cop with a gun fetish tries to help solve the murder of a colleague in a spoof of cliches from some recent hit films. (Rated PG-13)

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Both Tara and Sean, 11 and 12, gave this film five out of five stars.

“I think it was a perfect movie,” Sean said. “It was cool.”

The only thing is, he said, “you have to watch a lot of movies to understand it.”

He and Tara, siblings, see one or two movies a week. They knew when the movie was making fun of the silly guys in “Wayne’s World,” the too-complicated wire-cutting scene in “Lethal Weapon” and the bickering Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles in the sewer.

But there were also Mad magazine type sendups of some super-R-rated movies such as “Basic Instinct” (the famous Sharon-Stone-in-a-swivel-chair scene) and “Silence of the Lambs” (the jailhouse-interview-with-a-cannibal scene). Even though they hadn’t been allowed to see those movies, Sean said he recognized many of them as spoofs anyway from the commercials he’d seen.

They also laughed at the cliches common to many macho cop films--the crime scene cluttered with yellow tape (“Caution: wet blood”) and the plate-glass windows that invariably turn up for bodies to fall through.

Tara liked the police station scene in which, instead of sketching a description of the criminal, an artist put together a Mr. Potato Head. “And then they arrested him.”

The movie also makes fun of gratuitous sex scenes. As the cop walks nude into the night, his girlfriend asks him, “Where are you going?” He replies, “Nowhere. I’m just taking one of those unmotivated butt-in-the-moonbeam walks.”

Tara likes the original “Lethal Weapon”-type movies less than her brother does. “Most of them are not really interesting,” she said. “They’re really for adults--the killing and everything. But I think this one was mainly really funny.”

Sean said he thought seeing a spoof of violent movies might make kids think differently about the originals.

“It might make you take them a little less seriously. Like the gang movies. If you watch a movie that’s slamming gangs, saying gangs are stupid, it might keep you out of gangs.”

So, now that filmmakers know those movies are so dumb that kids can easily appreciate a satire on them, why not use their creativity to make better movies?