15 More Dumb Movies Which Are Secretly Smart

On the surface, The Naked Gun films are similar to later spoof films like the Scary Movie films or all those Friedberg and Seltzer parodies, in that they're wacky, juvenile and, in a sense, pretty silly.

Nonetheless, there is a very important distinction between The Naked Gun films and most of their spiritual successors. While the overwhelming majority of all those other spoof movies are shockingly awful The Naked Gun trilogy is completely and utterly brilliant. In all three films, there's literally at least one gag every minute of screen-time and pretty much all of them land beautifully.

The Naked Gun might just be the best comedy film ever and although the sequels aren't quite as great, they are still terrific. 

The key difference between The Naked Gun Trilogy and other films in the spoof genre is that, aside from being blessed with the late, great Leslie Nielsen giving one of the funniest film performances you'll ever see, these films were beautifully written and seriously well-crafted. In contrast, terrible films like Meet the Spartans, Epic Movie and worst of all, Disaster Movie are just complete messes that churn out one meaningless, irrelevant joke after another.

It's hard to make this juvenile style of comedy work, as most other attempts have shown, but these films really pulled it off and for carrying out that tricky task so successfully, they deserve to be acknowledged as genuinely intelligent comedies.