Review and news hub for movies, music and video games

Movie:		7.0
Picture:		5.0
Sound:		6.0
Extras:		5.0
Score:		6.0

Director(s):	David Zucker • Jerry Zucker • Jim Abrahams
Writer(s):	Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, Martyn Burke
Starring:	Val Kilmer • Lucy Gutteridge • Michael Gough
Genre:	Comedy
Website:	http://www.the80sondvd.com
Release Date:	February 03, 2009
Rated:

List Price:	DVD - $14.98
Amazon:

Hey, remember that movie that played constantly on Comedy Central about a decade ago? No, not Half-Baked, National Lampoon’s Vacation, or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That’s right. Top Secret! is now re-released on a special "I Love the 80s" Edition of the DVD.

The brain-child of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, the people behind Airplane! and The Naked Gun, Top Secret! is a double-header parody of both Elvis movies and war movies, featuring American rock and roll star Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer in his first movie) traveling to East Germany to give a concert. Through a series of unfortunate events, he gets caught up with Hillary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge), a member of the East German resistance, who is trying to break her father (Michael Gough) out of prison with the help of her comrades. As the film-makers wholeheartedly admit themselves, that’s about as far as the plot goes.

For the most part, this movie works. The gag-to-laugh ratio is about 2 to 1, with only a few real groaners in there. Omar Sharif makes an amusing cameo as a resistance spy early on in the film, and the bit about the East German Women’s Olympic Team is as funny as any of the sight gags in either the Airplane! or Hot Shots! Films. The film also pulls off the daunting task of making its musical numbers work, which could have been a huge liability had they not. Performed by Kilmer himself, the film is peppered with a number of standards (‘Tutti Frutti” among them), during which everyone in a given location spontaneously breaks out into song and dance. Amazingly, these are performed straight enough that they don’t cause bile to shoot up into your throat, but are actually fun in the way that they’re intended.

That said, it’s not hard to see how this didn’t become the kind of classic that Airplane! has. There are a number of clearly missed opportunities here, where things that very well might have come off as fun on paper just seem kind of nonsensical on film (as a parody of 60s beach songs, the best they could do was “skeet shooting,” in which surfers all run around with 12 gauges?) And while Kilmer is good, he doesn’t provide the solid comedic grounding that Leslie Nielsen later provided for the Naked Gun films (you’re never tempted to quote him afterward). Even with Sharif and a really odd cameo by Peter Cushing as a Swedish bookstore owner, the performance of the film is clearly Christopher Villers, the leader of the Resistance who was also the former lover of Hillary Flammond (in a hilarious flashback parody of The Blue Lagoon). Unfortunately, he doesn’t show up until about two-thirds of the way through the movie.

The DVD has several special features, including:

The Original Theatrical Trailer - which only really makes any sense once you’ve already seen the film.

Storyboards for Several Scenes - Interesting mainly so that you can see the difference between what they thought that characters were going to look like and the final result.

Four Alternate Scenes - Bits that were dropped from scenes. Reasonably funny all, but it’s easy to see how they interrupted the general flow of the picture.

Group Commentary by Directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker. Producers Jon Davison and Hunt Lowry, and Moderator Fred Rubin - Now this is kind of interesting. No matter what criticisms I may have had (and I liked this movie), the directors seem downright embarrassed (when ‘The End’ comes up on screen, one of them comments on how it should be ‘Thank God’). They come up with a few interesting notes about actors, and a few ‘this is how we did this’ moments, but mostly, they need to be goaded into saying anything by Rubin.