As a child in the 1980s, it felt like everybody watched the Police Academy movies. As a middle-aged film critic in the 2020s, it feels like no one of that my vintage wants to admit they ever watched them at all.

I mean, I understand it. The original Police Academy (1984) capitalised on a popular trend of ribald movie comedies in the early 1980s, largely kickstarted by John Landis’ Animal House (1978), in which an assortment of misfits and rebels engaged in all manner of hijinks and pranks against their respective authority figures. The film made a star of Steve Guttenberg, and featured a memorable group of quirky supporting characters. It was not exactly good, per se, but it scored laughs with the audience of the time. Regardless of quality the film wound grossing US$150 million from a remarkably modest budget, and that – in true 1980s fashion – guaranteed a long, repetitive factory line of sequels for several years. Critics hated them. Audiences enjoyed them, albeit with fewer viewers going to the cinema each time.

My point is that we all watched these movies, and most of us now seem ashamed that we did. Except for you, of course. I am sure you never watched them. You were always above such things.

No, I believe you.

These films have not aged well. The sequels – including Citizens on Patrol – got progressively less entertaining until the franchise was finally put out of its misery following 1994’s Police Academy: Mission to Moscow. In the latter days things got so desperate that Warner Bros tried both a television sitcom and a children’s cartoon.

Anyway, I happen to possess a DVD boxed set of all seven films – or, as I like to think of it, a four-film set packaged with three frisbees – and in a mood that was both nostalgic and curious checked the fourth film out. The fourth because I had not seen it since the first time on VHS, and because the film really does mark the threshold from ‘watchable’ to ‘not watchable’. It is also Steve Guttenberg’s final appearance as franchise lead Officer Mahoney; when they came to shoot Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach, Guttenberg was busy filming Leonard Nimoy’s Three Men and a Baby.

The striking thing about Citizens on Patrol is that it does not really have a storyline. It is clear that one was written, in which academy Commandant Lassard (an always game George Gaynes) launches a new scheme to enlist random members of the public as police officers. The film’s key guest character is journalist Claire Mattson (Sharon Stone), who appears throughout the film and acts as Mahoney’s new love interest, but in the finished film she has literally nothing to do. She is not the only remnant of Gene Quintano’s original screenplay: there are little moments and scenes littered throughout that point to a more traditional kind of narrative comedy. The bulk of the film, however, essentially works as sketch comedy.

I actually think it might have been a smart approach. The Police Academy audience was in love with these idiosyncratic characters, whether Bobcat Goldthwait’s manic Zed McGlunk, or the trigger-happy Sergeant Tackleberry (David Graf), or the squeaky-voiced Sergeant Laverne Hooks (Marion Ramsay). For these viewers, the paper-thin stories never really mattered anyway: the audience was there to see funny characters do funny things, and that is precisely what Citizens on Patrol provides. I mean, on the one hand this is terrible filmmaking. On the other, if a film delivers what its core audience are craving and satisfies them, who are the rest of us to judge?