“The Naked Gun” and “Spinal Tap II”. Two films, both alike in indignity, on a cinema screen near you, where we lay our scene — and where one I’m ignoring, one I’m waiting for.

I am just fascinated by this: I may be a little wary of the Spinal Tap sequel, but there is not one pixel of a chance that I’ll go see the Naked Gun in cinemas, specifically because of how they’ve been marketed. Sometimes it feels as if you have a film and you have the marketing campaign, which are two separate things, and other times the pair work together well.

So for instance, I am certain that a reason I went to see “Barbie” was because of its absolutely applause-worthy billboard that was simply solid pink, no images, and just the release date in the corner. Because it was precisely the right pink you instantly recognised what it was advertising and that poster fitted with both the rest of the campaign and the somehow joyous feel of the film. Utterly perfect marketing, I think.

With Spinal Tap and The Naked Gun, they’re both based on 1980s films. They’re both being made so that they come out at a time when enough of the original audience is feeling nostalgic, or at least enough of them haven’t died yet. They of course want a new and young audience, but they’re trading on the familiarity, the popularity of their original versions.

Now, it seems to me that The Naked Gun is solely doing that. There doesn’t seem to be any in-story reason for it existing. Whereas with Spinal Tap, the conceit is that if this rock band does not perform again, they will lose the rights to their material. It’s nice gag that plays to the age of the group, and so to the age of the audience, and if it’s surely as contrived as The Naked Gun revival, it’s very well contrived.

So that was the first word of the Tap sequel, although it followed years of really tremendous wish-I’d-thought-of-it jokes. Such as in 2009 when Tap performed a one-night-only World Tour. Or in that same event, they appeared as their own support act, in the guise of The Folksmen from another of the team’s films, A Mighty Wind.

The Naked Gun has had nothing except for continual posting to YouTube of clips from the original TV show it was based on, Police Squad! Those clips convey the silliness of the first show, but also some exceptional writing. The interview of Sally Decker, for instance. To this day, if anyone speaks about having filled in for someone, I’m left thinking “Phil Din? He’s the night watchman, Frank.”

Or the precision of the overlapping conversation as a suspect is interrogated in the foreground while in the background an officer brings in lunch.

And to this day, decades later, if I’m in a conversation where someone goes, I don’t know, “Let’s say you knew all about it.” When that happens, it takes enormous, just enormous physical effort for me not to turn to an imaginary camera and say “You knew all about it.”

I think it’s interesting that Police Squad! keeps circulating on YouTube and, in what the algorithm shows me anyway, there isn’t so much from The Naked Gun films. 

Until recently, when the trailer for the new film came out and to my mind, it’s a trailer for the wrong film. I’ve seen clips since that seem better, but the tone of the trailer, the jokes it shows, it’s peurile. I question how young you have to be, how easy an audience you have to be, to find Liam Neeson wearing spotted underware to be hilarious.

Whereas in the last week or so, the trailer for Spinal Tap II dropped and I’m in. It’s new and I don’t think it’s just a repeat of the original, the way that Star Wars films do. Yet the flavour of the trailer is right, the tone of it is right.

Spinal Tap II could be dreadful. The Naked Gun could be brilliant. But the perception their marketing has given me is so different. One of these films seems certain to be a two-star movie at best, while the other feels like it has a chance to go to 11.