Director Akiva Schaffer’s Naked Gun reboot is chock-full of deliriously stupid gags, celebrity cameos, and deadpan goodness — in short, all the things that made the original Leslie Nielsen classic so beloved.
But in a film full of comedic highlights, the standout sequence has to be the ridiculous romantic montage between Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) and Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), in which they head to a romantic snowy cabin getaway, summon a magic snowman, have a threesome with said snowman, make the snowman jealous, and then flee for their lives from the killer snowman. It’s Naked Gun meets Jack Frost, and it had me going from “no way they’re doing this” to “please, I never want this to end” in the span of mere minutes.
Given that the snowman romance-turned-slasher is such a fever dream, it only makes since that it came to Schaffer in the wee hours of the morning.
“One night, at four in the morning, I woke up to go to the bathroom, and I just saw the entire thing,” Schaffer told Mashable in a Zoom interview.
Schaffer, along with co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, had always wanted to include a love montage in the film. It would serve as one of the reboot’s many tributes to the original Naked Gun, which throws Nielsen and Priscilla Presley into a gloriously cheesy parody of other ’80s movie montages. But Schaffer, Gregor, and Mand knew that they couldn’t just recreate that beat for beat: They’d have to do something different enough to make it stand out.
Enter Schaffer’s early morning vision of the killer snowman, which he wrote up “in about 10 minutes” and sent to Gregor and Mand straight away.
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“[What I wrote] is almost beat for beat what’s in the movie,” Schaffer said. “It barely changed.”
Once the love montage was written, the focus turned on how to bring the snowman itself to life.
“The VFX department flagged a million dollars for a VFX snowman, and then, very quickly, everyone’s like, ‘Well, you can’t do that sequence, it’s too expensive,'” Schaffer recalled. “We had to keep being like, ‘It’s not going to be CG. It needs to be a puppet, a mascot costume.’ So we got the Jim Henson Company involved.”
“They came in late to the process,” added producer Erica Huggins. “They knew exactly what the assignment was, and they worked very closely with Akiva to make sure that [the snowman] wasn’t too slick.”
“It was basically like Jabba the Hutt,” Schaffer joked.
The puppet’s lack of slick visual realism is why the snowman sequence works so well. There’s an endearing, nostalgic quality to the puppeteering — especially the simple yet expressive eyebrows. When the montage takes its turn into slasher territory, that endearing quality takes the comedy to the next level. After all, who goes into a Naked Gun movie expecting to see a Frosty the Snowman Muppet try to kill Liam Neeson?
Even Neeson was astounded by the sequence, telling Mashable: “I remember reading it in the script and thinking, ‘No, this is too crazy. It’s too outrageous.’ But it seems to work.”
The Naked Gun is now in theaters.
