Yes, it’s true. Even after the sheer ridiculousness that the endless sequels have already reached, epitomized by the spectacular train wreck Mission to Moscow, it seems that Steve Guttenberg is attempting to jump-start his long-dead career with another Police Academy movie. As you know, we recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the original release of the original movie (well, someone celebrated it, I’m sure), but I can’t imagine that this is any reason to keep churning out sequels, is it? At what point did the Police Academy series officially become a joke? I don’t know exactly, but it was years ago.

How about a quick recap of some recent and upcoming bad sequel ideas? The obvious ones were the resurrections of Rambo and Rocky, although both of those turned out to be good. Good work, Stallone! I hope you’re coaching Guttenberg on getting back in blue in his ill-advised upcoming project! (by the way, did I mention that Stallone has already signed on to direct Rambo 5 and a Rambo 6 is rumored?)

Thus far I’ve only seen the first half of Die Hard 4, although so far so good. I’ll get around to the rest of it eventually. Indiana Jones was recently brought back to life with the disappointing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but if Harrison Ford can’t pull off the long-overdue and totally unnecessary sequel, what hope does Guttenberg have?

Leslie Easterbrook (the one on the left), one of the only original cast members to have signed on for Police Academy 8. She doesn't look busy.

But there’s hope, at least Guttenberg isn’t as thoroughly delusional as another Steve – Seagal, who hopes to set Under Siege 3 in SPACE. Hell yes! If you already know you can’t make a good movie, go for the worst movie you can possibly turn out! We’re rooting for you Steve! See if you can surpass Against the Dark for pure, unfiltered crappiness! I believe in you!

Yes, that’s right, Under Siege 3 is officially coming to a theater near you, as is Police Academy 8. Although if I might be so bold as to venture a prediction, I’m going to go ahead and suppose that the “theater near you” is going to be the one in your living room. Seagal and Guttenberg in first-run theaters? Right. Not while the sky’s still blue.

But here’s hoping, right? For now I’ll let you digest all that good news about upcoming movies, but stay tuned next week when I will give you some more details about Guttenberg’s plan to make another Three Men and a Baby movie while the public foams at the mouth for what we really want, another Short Circuit! Johnny 5 is alive!!

Ok, so by pure chance I watched the original Police Academy movie yesterday and then realized that last Monday, March 23rd, was the 25th Anniversary of the original release of the movie. As you know, the series was treated to a cast reunion back in 2004 that resulted in the surprisingly interesting documentaries “Behind Academy Doors: Secret Files Revealed,” and the curiously named “All Washed Up: Floating Memories,” an episodic recap of each Police Academy movie, all of which you can find in the current DVD collections. As far as I can tell, however, there is no celebration of the 25th anniversary of the series, so it seems that Hollywire is once again your only source for what’s cool!

In the “Behind Academy Doors” documentary, it is revealed that producer Paul Maslansky got the idea for the whole premise of Police Academy when he was working on Hot Stuff in the late 1970s. Evidently there was a police force in charge of crowd control during the making of that movie that was, ah, interestingly diverse to the point that it caught Maslansky’s attention and inspired him to approach a sergeant and ask him why there were so many gym class drop-outs on the force. The sergeant replied that they had a fair employment policy in place that compelled them to accept any applicant who took an interest in becoming an officer, but then with a wink he explained that they could flunk out whoever they wanted after three weeks. Instantly, a light bulb popped on above Maslansky’s head.

Do you see what this means? Police Academy is based on a true story!!

Here's a picture of Steve Guttenberg at the Iron Man premiere last year. I have no idea why he was there.

And speaking of the story, this is it – In response to public discontent as a result of a crime wave that has been sweeping the city, the Mayor puts in place a new rule forcing the Police Department to accept any new applicant regardless of age, height, weight, sex, background, attitude, religion, nationality, IQ, criminal history, or SAT score, which causes the police academy to be bombarded with societal aberrations the likes of which would surely cause the public more concern than the criminals causing the crime wave in the first place.

No nonsense Police Chief Henry Hurst is immediately and thoroughly appalled at the new ruling as he watches the dregs of society flood his beloved police academy, while Commandant Lassard sits in his chair and cheerfully allows the curious developments of life to happen around him as they will. Most of the recruits that become central to the story are honest people who really want to be police officers, except for Casey Mahoney (Steve Guttenburg, in a career-making-and-then-breaking role), who is forced into the academy as an alternative to jail.

How could anyone at any time ever be offered the choice of becoming a police officer or going to jail? Watch the movie and you’ll find out, but it doesn’t really matter. It has to do with Mahoney having a powerful father, but the point is that Mahoney is a smart-ass who has not a scrap of respect for authority and who is determined to get himself booted out of the academy before lunch on the first day. The academy is equally happy to be rid of him, but for circumstances beyond either of their controls, this is not an option. It’s a preposterous situation, but you have to admire it’s simplicity and effectiveness in paving the way for a whole movie full of slapstick hilarity.

Michael Winslow making sounds into a microphone nearly a quarter century after Police Academy made him famous.

The rest of the relevant cast provide the springboard from which six sequels sprouted in subsequent years. Indeed, the plots of the movies run a distant second to who is back for each subsequent movie. Moses Hightower is a towering black man who became tired of being a florist, of all things, and decided to become a cop. His counterpart is Cadet Hooks, a mousy black woman with the voice of a stretched balloon who, among other things, must learn to speak with authority. Larvell Jones comes from a background similar to Mahoney’s in a lot of ways but is better known for his ability to imitate the sound of almost anything (this was also a career-making-and-breaking role for Michael Winslow). Then there are Tackleberry, the trigger-happy but hilarious gun fanatic, Karen Thompson, the attractive cadet played by Kim Cattrall who provides a welcome distraction for Mahoney, the overweight and perfectly named Leslie Barbara (a man), and Doug Fackler, a priceless geek who is prone to cause accidents that don’t affect himself. And overseeing them all is the delightfully creepy Lieutenant Harris, who is determined that they shall all fail miserably.

This should seem like an exceedingly easy task, but as they say, never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers!

The first movie in the Police Academy saga follows little more than the adventures of the recruits described above as they work their way through the police academy. There is a delightful competition between Lieutenant Harris, who treats his job with deadly seriousness as needed to ensure his own advancement, and the rest of the recruits, with Commandant Lassard popping up occasionally to fulfill the duties of a man clearly more interested in goldfish than law enforcement, but it’s impossible not to love the guy.

Picture this guy about 23 years younger and you'll see the Lieutenant Harris that we all came to know and love to hate.

Speaking of which, Lassard is the, umm, “victim” of one of the movie’s more childish and unamusing jokes. I am not sure how successful the joke was when the movie was first released (I was 5 years old at the time and can’t remember my initial reaction), but it is an unfortunate representative of much of the rest of the movie.

Police Academy is a milestone in the evolution of the cheesy comedy, there are no two ways about that, but the comedy in the movie has, ah, not dated well. Modern audiences will likely not find not a single genuinely funny moment in the entire movie, but it would be madness to say that this means the movie isn’t any fun.

I remember when I was a kid I used to drive my brother nuts because I always wanted to watch Police Academy movies over and over again, but at some point I lost interest, and didn’t gain interest again until about a week ago when I stumbled across the Police Academy DVD collection. But for an amusing trip to the comedy of the past, you can hardly do better. Grab a couple beers, bring your buddies over, and relish the comedy of your childhood. There were never any Academy Awards in mind, but I’m willing to bet that you can’t watch this movie without having a little fun…

4 Beans out of 5.

Celebrities can get away with a lot, but this is ridiculous. Steve Guttenberg has been spotted running through a park without pants. Surely the man can afford running pants, but maybe he’s a chaffer. Whatever the case may be, you can watch Steve’s hot bare bouncing booty captured on film at CelebNewsWire.com. You won’t believe what you’re seeing.

If the video is a tad too blurry for you, here’s a little reminder from his 1983 film, “The Man Who Wasn’t There”…

Well, there you are, Steve!

I gotta admit, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t really find this stuff amusing anymore, but for some reason the Police Academy movies are still their own brand of fun. I was just reading through some of the message boards about the movies on the IMDb about what peoples’ favorite scenes were from part 3 and from the series as a whole, and not one of the scenes mentioned was genuinely funny to me anymore. I remember when I was a kid I loved the movies unconditionally and used to drive my brother insane because I always wanted to watch them, but I can’t really remember if I just found the movies fun or if I actually got some good belly laughs out of them. Regardless, the vast majority of the comedy has not dated well, but they are still an amusing romp through the hilarious clothing and comedy styles of the 80s!

This time around, Commandant Lassard finds himself in a bit of a moment of crisis as the governor decides that it is no longer financially reasonable to maintain two police academies (the other one headed by the beloved Lieutenant Mauser from part 2), and so one of them will have to be closed. Which academy will be closed depends on performances during a period of observation by an evaluation team.

Needless to say, Mauser employs the help of the hilariously idiotic Proctor and the same two goon cadets, Copeland and Blanks, who have been employed by both Mauser and Harris to create problems for our cast of heroes since the first movie. In order to save Lassard’s academy, and their own beloved alma mater, from being closed, all of our favorite Police Academy cast members have been brought back from Their First Assignment to become instructors at the academy and ensure that the place looks good.

So there you have the setup and the basic plot, and other than that it’s essentially exactly the same movie as the first two. The characters are the same, the music’s the same, the good guys and bad guys are the same, just the skits are different and this time we have the addition of a few negligible characters, the token geek (Sweetchuck), the token Japanese guy (who really serves no other purpose than to grin like an imbecile and become mesmerized by Callahan’s prodigious bosoms), and also the ridiculous additions to the force of Fackler’s nutty wife and Tackleberry’s nutty brother-in-law. You know, the guy who is always trading punches with his own father. Can you imagine putting a police uniform on such a man? Only in a Police Academy movie!

There is not really anything of special note that happens during the movie, although it is a little revealing that this is arguably the funniest installment in the entire series. In keeping with the two preceding movies, we are introduced to the characters in the same way, by glimpsing them in their current lives before the needs of a new movie call them back to the Police Academy world. Hightower is dressing up as an old woman in order to catch purse snatchers in the park, Tackleberry is playing safari in the backyard with his brother-in-law, Fackler is trying to prevent his wife from joining the force (in a scene eerily reminiscent of his first scene in the original movie), and Mahoney is a…women’s basketball coach?

Whatever, it doesn’t matter what they’re doing, their current occupations or pastimes or whatever are just little jokes as they’re introduced into the movie. Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine a time when Mahoney’s constant flirtations were not as purely creepy as they are now. And that mischievous grin he gets when he’s about to play a trick on someone. I need a lot of beers before that’s funny, although I would be lying if I said the Police Academies aren’t a lot of fun after the beer count enters the double digits.

Unfortunately, there is also a definite feeling that in this installment the movie has turned into even more of a series of goofy jokes. Of course, the whole series is a bunch of goofy jokes, but I think that the second sequel is the first time when the characters that we know are used to throw in some moronic sight gags in order to get a cheap laugh, like when Tackleberry pulls out his gun and shoots a payphone because the operator refuses to relinquish her quarter, or Proctor getting locked out in the hallway ass-naked by a prostitute. On the other hand, my beer count was getting up there by this point, so I found both scenes to be pretty funny.

It is important to realize that director Jerry Paris developed most of his directing experience on television comedy series, which may have something to do with the, ah, conspicuous lack of subtlety in a lot of the sight gags in Police Academy 2 and 3. It’s interesting to consider the impact that his personal directing experience before coming into the Police Academy series may have shaped the series as a whole, which moved in that direction and then never managed to get away from it. And now it seems that Steve Guttenberg is attempting to put a Police Academy 8 in motion, in which case I can only hope that he doesn’t try to reinvent the series, although I have a feeling that it would take nothing less than a total reinvention to make yet another sequel worthwhile…

3 Beans out of 5.