Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry movies generally suffered a descent in quality as they progressed. The first Dirty Harry (1971) is easily the best of the bunch, directed by the late great Don Seigel, who handled the visceral content with crisp intelligence. You see it right from the opening shot, in which a cop's badge dissolves into the muzzle of a sniper's high-powered rifle, a combination of images that neatly summarized the shared, brutal realm of Eastwood's titular cop and the Zodiac-inspired psychotic Scorpio (Andrew Robinson) terrorizing San Francisco.

The first movie represented a perfect fusion of director and star. The subsequent films (all now available on special-edition DVDs), directed by miscellaneous Hollywood yeomen, relied on Eastwood's formidable presence more than filmmaking artistry. (Eastwood himself directed Sudden Impact, but he was in a yeoman's phase of his career just then.)

The idiots who made this movie -- and I don't use the term in the affectionate Mad Magazine sense of "the usual gang of idiots" -- invariably go for the cheap, obvious gag in this parody of Zach Snyder's highly stylized Battle of Thermopylae epic 300.