The 5 Best Leslie Nielsen Spoof Movies Ranked

For the bulk of his career, Leslie Nielsen was best known for his stern, dramatic roles. His tall stature and low voice had casting directors offering him parts as commanders, leaders, and even heavies. Many might recall Nielsen’s stone-faced turn in 1956’s “Forbidden Planet” as the captain in “The Poseidon Adventure,” or playing a cop in the 1972 cop drama “The Bold Ones: The Protectors.” In 1977’s “Day of the Animals” he plays a manly outdoorsman who loses his mind and, quite darkly, declares insane dominion over animals and women. Some might recall that he can hold his breath a long time, as he declared in “Creepshow.” Many will be shocked to witness Nielsen beat and assault Barbra Streisand in the 1987 drama “Nuts.” 

However, Nielsen did appear in a handful of comedies, most notably, playing Dr. Rumack in the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker farce “Airplane!” The parody proved that he had a talent for deadpan comedy, and he was able to say the silliest possible things with a straight face. Later, the ZAZ team would tap Nielsen to play Lieutenant Frank Drebin on their spoof 1982 TV series “Police Squad!” That led to a 1988 film adaptation called “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!,” effectively changing the course of Nielsen’s career. From that point forward, he was best known as a slapstick comedian. Given that Nielsen liked to bring fart machines to interviews, it was a shift he clearly embraced. 

After “Airplane!,” Nielsen starred in 16 spoof movies, right up until his death in 2010. Some of them were embarrassing misfires (he appeared in awful, latter-day spoofs like “Stan Helsing,” “2001: A Space Travesty,”  and the politically irresponsible “An American Tale”), but others have been legitimate comedy classics. Below are his five best spoof movies, ranked for purposes of playful debate. 

In Rick Friedburg’s 007 spoof “Spy Hard,” Nielsen plays Dick Steele, agent WD-40, who takes on a mission to rescue an innocent kidnapping victim named Barbara Dahl (Stephanie Romanov). Oh wait. Barbara Dahl. Barbie Doll. I get it. The villain he faces is the wicked General Rancor (Andy Griffith), who had robotic arms and who can attach various weapons and tools to his shoulders. Dick Steele’s boss is play by Charles Durning, and “Spy Hard” also has supporting roles for Barry Bostwick, Marcia Gay Harden, and Curtis Armstrong. Ray Charles hilariously plays a bus driver, and there are cameos from Hulk Hogan, Fabio, and Mr. T. 

“Spy Hard” came right before spoof movies tipped into idiocy, making it one of the better examples of the decade’s genre.

Nielsen’s spoof movies have always been stronger when they’re parodying one genre or film in particular, allowing them to stand apart from the wave of Friedberg/Seltzer spoofs that infected the 2000s. “Spy Hard” lampoons James Bond movies, yes, but it also folds in tropes from just about every espionage cliché the genre has to offer. “Spy Hard” also allowed Nielsen to play his role relatively straight, which was always his greatest comedic talent. 

Perhaps the best part of the film is that “Weird Al” Yankovic sang the opening theme song, riffing on James Bond music stylings, which instantly earns it extra points. “Spy Hard” was certainly more successful (although not as good) as Yankovic’s own 1989 spoof “UHF.” 

Few like Mel Brooks’ 1995 rendition of Bram Stoker’s vampire classic, but I admit a weakness. There is a bold, theatrical melodramatic tone to “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” that makes it earnest and, dare I say, hilarious. Nielsen plays Dracula, once again riding the line between an earnest performance and a silly one. He bonks his head a lot, slips on bat poop, and mugs plenty, but the bulk of the movie sees him doing an earnest Bela Lugosi impersonation. 

Nielsen is also surrounded by multiple excellent comedic performances. Lysette Anthony bites into her role as Lucy, while Amy Yasbeck is having fun as Mina. Steven Weber gets to take part in one of the greatest vampire staking scenes in cinema history (So much blood!), and Peter MacNicol deserved an Oscar for his turn as Renfield. The scene where he denies eating insects in front of Dr. Seward (Harvey Korman) is comedy on par with Harold Lloyd. It also helps that “Dracula” is a horny movie, possessed of a bawdiness that only Brooks could handle well. When Dracula’s brides attempt to seduce Renfield, he declares that it is wrong … before screaming that they should wrong his brains out. 

“Dracula” is a bit stodgy when compared to Brooks’ more popular (and much better) “Young Frankenstein,” but it’s nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, /Film even wrote a missive once rightly declaring that it very much doesn’t suck. 

Bob Logan’s 1990 spoof “Repossessed” might serve as an unofficial sequel to “The Exorcist” as well as a spoof of it. Linda Blair returned to the genre, this time to play Nancy Aglet, a woman who was possessed by the Devil when she was a girl. Blair isn’t just game, but she’s hysterical as both the repressed Nancy and the randy Satan. Nielsen plays the Father Merrin character, now named Father Mayii (yes, you may), and he is joined by the Karras stand-in, Father Brophy (Anthony Starke). 

/Film has hyped up “Repossessed” in the past, and our write-up rightly pointed out that spoofs function best when they’re sending up something earnest. The error of many recent spoof movies is that they send-up just about anything that’s popular, ridding themselves of a point of view and hoping to milk laughs from little more than the sock of recognition. “Repossessed” delves into the bleak, horrifying story of “The Exorcist,” but it also taps into the modern phenomenon of wicked, shallow Evangelical televangelists (Ned Beatty and Lana Schwab play Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker types). 

But the film, like the ZAZ films before it, cracks the whip on the jokes, putting in a pun or a visual gag every three seconds or so. “Repossessed” is relentless, and most of the jokes land amazingly well. Some gags haven’t aged well, of course — it’s to be expected for a 35-year-old film — but it’s largely impeccable.

One of the funniest films of all time, ZAZ’s “Airplane!” is a spoof of an obscure disaster movie no one has heard of. The story goes that Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker lets their brand-new VHS recorders running all night, wanting to see what weird garbage runs in the wee hours of the late 1970s. They found Hall Bartlett’s “Zero Hour!,” an airplane disaster movie starring Dana Andrews. Using “Zero Hour!” as their template, ZAZ made “Airplane!,” a spoof that borrows characters and lines of dialogue wholesale from its source. 

Disaster movies were very much in vogue in the late 1970s, and Leslie Nielsen even starred in one of the best: “The Poseidon Adventure.” He returned to play the very serious Dr. Rumack in “Airplane!,” a film about bad fish causing a breakout of illness and nausea on a night flight to Chicago. A former soldier with PTSD, played by Robert Hayes, has to take control of the plane when the pilots all take ill. He must also reconnect with Julie Hagerty, who played his ex-girlfriend. Peter Graves, Kareen Abdul-Jabbar, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges also appear. 

I would relate some of the gags here, but it would be to repeat gags you already know. The film is widely known, and it often tops lists of the funniest movies ever. If you haven’t seen it, please do so immediately.

Some purists may object to “The Naked Gun” being at the top of this list, as it is fundamentally different from “Police Squad!,” the TV show that inspired it. “Police Squad!” saw Nielsen’s character, Lieutenant Frank Drebin, go through hard-boiled cop drama with a stone face and a taciturn demeanor. “The Naked Gun” lets him be a lot more broad, engaging in pratfalls, farting into microphones, and wearing full-body condoms. The humor, as such, is little more obvious as a result. 

But I say “feh” to the purists, as “The Naked Gun,” despite the shift in tone, is unbearably hilarious, and it strikes a perfect balance between the serious and the slapstick. The plot involves an evil billionaire ,played by Ricardo Montalbán, plotting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II (Jeannette Charles) using a mind-control device. Frank Drebin becomes involved with a femme fatale (Priscilla Presley) in his investigations. 

“The Naked Gun” was a massive success, making over $150 million on a $12 million budget, more or less assuring that spoof movies would live on for at least another decade. And they did! We got some good ones along the way too. Thanks to the success of “The Naked Gun,” Nielsen, previously a heavy, was now a beloved comedian to a new generation. “Airplane!” may have redirected Nielsen’s career toward comedy, but “The Naked Gun” made him immortal. 

This year, The Lonely Island’s Akiva Shaffer (director of “Hot Rod” and “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” is bringing back “The Naked Gun” with Liam Neeson set to play the son of Frank Drebin. He seems to be a good choice, as Neeson also has a talent for deadpan delivery. The new “Naked Gun” is due in theaters on August 1, 2025, and it’s one of our most anticipated movies of 2025.