Top Secret! (1984)

Directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker & Jerry Zucker. Starring Val Kilmer, Lucy Gutteridge, Christopher Villiers, Jeremy Kemp, Jim Carter, Harry Ditson, Eddie Tagoe, Michael Gough, Billy J. Mitchell, Omar Sharif, Warren Clarke, Ian McNeice. [PG]

Spy spoof, partially told in the format of an Elvis Presley musical, set in East Germany during the Cold War…but the heroes are the French Resistance and the villains are Nazis!? American rock star Nick Rivers (Kilmer, his first film role) arrives in the Eastern Bloc to perform at a music festival, but gets plunged into a plot to prevent the destruction of the NATO submarine fleet; story doesn’t make much sense, and doesn’t try to, as it’s just an excuse for absurd jokes and set pieces that poke fun at everything from Casablanca and The Conspirators to The Great Escape and The Blue Lagoon. The writing/directing team of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (“ZAZ”) uses the same saturation-style approach as their earlier Airplane! and later The Naked Gun, and if the results aren’t quite as consistent or gaspingly funny as those two comedy classics, it still offers a hearty volume of chortles, belly laughs, and eye-rolls. Songs include covers of popular numbers like “Tutti Frutti” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” plus a couple of originals, including a very funny Beach Boys mash-up parody: “Skeet Surfin’”. Bonus: Kilmer does his own singing. Be sure to stick around to watch the credits. Peter Cushing cameos as a “backwards” bookstore owner.

71/100