The gags come fast and furious. Director Ezio Greggio serves them up so relentlessly that it doesn’t matter when some fall flat, the others just keep coming. As with the style perpetuated by Airplane, the film conducts lots of visual gags – at the asylum a guard opens an eyehole in a wooden door but then the camera pulls back to reveal the guard is carrying a small board with an eyehole in it around on a stick; as Charlene Tilton flees with the money she hears voices debating in her head, but then the camera pulls back to show the voices come from people yelling at her through loud hailers in a truck driving alongside; a clock’s hands are seen spinning in a classic cinematic time-lapse device but these have to be nailed down. For some reason Greggio has it in for the Clinton presidency – we meet Bush and Clinton lookalikes jogging whereupon Bush comments: “I see the Presidential escort is out. But where is the President, I only see her husband,” and later, “Why’s he puffing so hard? You know he doesn’t inhale.”

The film conducts a lot of jokes on its source targets. Martin Balsam appears playing exactly the same role he did in Psycho. There is a parody of his famous stabbing and falling down the stairs – here he is stabbed with knives, carrots, vibrators and umbrellas and as the camera follows him down the stairs he takes off and starts flying through the sky in back projection. There is naturally a parody of the Psycho shower sequence – the jittery string music comes from an orchestra sitting outside the shower, and when Greggio fails to stab Tilton, he employs an Uzi and a rocket launcher. Dom de Luise does a rather amusing parody of Hannibal Lecter – “If I ate fava beans, I’d be free,” he says, “ I’d blow that back wall right out.” Billy Zane watches as de Luise walks up around the walls and roofs of his cell and comments: “He doesn’t even obey the laws of physics.” There are all sorts of gags – a parody of Sharon Stone’s crotch-flashing scene in Basic Instinct (1992) – this time the flashee has hairy man’s legs. John Astin turns up doing a turn on his role from tv’s The Addams Family (1964-6), replete even with his own Thing. The climax of the film has everybody removing masks to reveal they are somebody else – “Dallas was never like this,” comments Charlene Tilton. In the highly amusing epilogue director Greggio takes a shower, only to be stabbed by the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock. Although the film received a thorough trashing when it came out, it is amiably silly fun.