Film review: Top Secret! (1984)

Very silly.  This is by the people who did Airplane! but it comes across as a cross between Mel Brooks and South Park.  Not as laugh-out-loud as Airplane! and a few cringeworthy moments, but some inspired silliness.  It's a strange mix of a spoof of an Elvis film (with Val Kilmer doing an excellent job as a teen 50's style heartthrob, albeit singing a mix of 50's and 60's style music - the best being "Skeet Surfin'") with a cold war spy thriller/WWII war film (there's an obligatory nod to the Steve McQueen motorcycle jump in The Great Escape, albeit followed up by jumping a string of buses, a la Evel Knievel).  It's set in a bizarro East Germany that is somehow also Nazi Germany, and somehow has a French Resistance operating within it.  Of course it is pointless to quibble about absurdities in a film like this, where much of the humor is from sheer absurdity, sprayed at the viewer at such a speed and volume that if you don't like/get one joke (like the giant statue of a pigeon that has little flying humans pissing on it) then another will be along in a second.  Some work (the extended underwater western bar fight is inspired), many do not.  Crassness (like a sex toy called The Anal Intruder, with a giant fake fist attachment) abounds.  In fact, were it not for Val Kilmer's central sincere, sweet performance, the film would probably fall flat, as very few of the other performers (who are mostly recognizable, if at all, from 70's British TV - with the odd exception of Omar Sharif!) doing much heavy lifting.  If you've exhausted the early, good Mel Brooks (and Airplane!) then it's certainly preferable to watching History of the World or anything later.  This should give you a taste - it claims to be the best bits, but there are plenty more of the same.