Top secret!

I love this movie

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source: Top Secret!

I am probably suspicious to say anything about this film, since that i really dislike the parody genre, but frankly that one is awful even for that genre. Jesus. It's so dull and repetitive that almost walked out. I mean, obviously there was a gag or two that inevitably made me laugh, specifically the cows scene, but apart of that scene, the rest is garbage. The story is totally disjointed and confuse, even for a spoof film. Some of the references are not funny at all, and i am familiar with the WW2 'spy' sub-genre. Val Kilmer's debut couldn't be any worse. He tries to be funny, but his acting limitations were evident here. Being funny is not something easy, anyways. Omar Sharif was, despite his relatively short screen-time, in the most dumbest and ridiculous gags in the film. I didn't want to believe that the guy who played the protagonist so masterfully in Dr. Zhivago was in that dumb film. After 90 minutes of childish and crude sexual jokes, you probably will think: What did i just watch? Because it's really impressive: but not in a good way. Avoid it. 3.8/10

There was a time when spoof movies were funny. They relied on visual gags. They relied on jokes. They relied on ridiculous situations, funny characters and subverting expectations. In short, they relied on comedy to sell the product. Then filmmakers got lazy. Really lazy. Instead of carefully crafting a joke or scene they went for pop culture references that immediately date the movie and make it unwatchable a few years later. But during the 80's we had a series of gems of the genre and this is possibly one of the funniest. The story, if you can call it such, deals with a young man played by Val Kilmer who's the biggest rock star of his time. His big hit, "Skeet Surfing" where people take to the waves on their surfboards and try to hit their targets while wielding shotguns. Silly? Of course. That's what this movie is all about. His adventures take him to Europe where he fights against the East Germans, falls in love and Pac Man shows up in one scene for no readily explained reason. The jokes and sight gags come at you very fast sometimes in the foreground, often times in the background and everywhere else. One example is he goes to a fancy restaurant for dinner but they won't let him in without a jacket. So instead of pulling some musty old jacket out of the closet, they bring in a tailor to make him a tuxedo which is ready in five minutes so he can have dinner. Some of the jokes land, some don't but they're all played straight and no attention it called to them. It's as if nothing is out of the ordinary which makes it much funnier. This movie is in the style of classics such as Airplane, not whatever Selzter and Friedberg monstrosity has come out this year. It's funny. You should give it a watch.

Well, I got enough of guessing if the humor in this movie is voluntary, or involuntary. Some may call it a parody, but the only parody is the claim of the authors that they know anything about film making. They certainly have no clue about geography, history, the difference between Communism and Fascism (East Germany was more anti-fascist than its Western counterpart, guys!) and less of all about cinema. The only humor may be related to some US TV comedy jokes, but this is mostly lost 18 years after the making of the movie, or was lost from the beginning for the non-US audiences. Skip this precursor of the parody about films genre when you meet it at the movie rentals. 4/10 on my personal scale.

An American rock and roll idol goes behind the iron curtain (while there was one!) for a culture fest but instead becomes involved in the resistance movement. Forget about the film itself, the very idea of an Elvis Presley movie being mixed with a French resistance film and produced by the Airplane! crew is enough for laugh number one. Not only is this a bizarre world but seems to be playing games with time and history, the communist East Germany being portrayed as a kind of war time Nazi set-up! Kilmer does well with an impossible role to the point where you wonder if he didn't miss his vocation. He can sing and dance better than many real singers and he proved in The Doors that he is really a major musical force. Strangely it is rumoured that he didn't realise this was a satire! The stupidity of many Elvis movies and those Saturday morning children's reels (scientist and beautiful daughter) are taken to the cleaners and you have fantastic sight gags. The "falling guard" gag is one of the best sight gags in the history of movies - I challenge anyone not to laugh at it. I enjoy a stupid movie every now and then and admit I enjoyed this one. Clearly the authors know little about German history or European culture and the little they do know seems cribbed from watching bad B movies on the subject, but what the hell. This is too stupid for anyone to get seriously uptight about. "How silly can you get?" sings Kilmer at one point in the film: Maybe a little, but not that much!