Top Secret
Year: | 1984 |
Studio: | Paramount |
Director: | Jim Abrahams/David Zucker/Jerry Zucker |
Producer: | Jon Davidson/Hunt Lowry |
Writer: | Jim Abrahams/David Zucker/Jerry Zucker |
Cast: | Val Kilmer, Omar Shariff, Peter Cushing |
God knows how, because while it doesn't reach the hallowed heights of their 1980 tribute to the campy airport dramas, they use the same m.o.; ridiculous story, the most quotable dialogue in film history and a plethora of visual gags.
It was Val Kilmer's film debut as Nick Rivers, an Elvis-inspired American rock star who travels to East Germany at the height of the Cold War to take part in a cultural festival.
But the festival is a front to divert the world's attention away from the real plans of the faux-Nazi, faux-Bolshevik East German leadership.
Nick is soon embroiled in a clandestine plot with the French Resistance in a story that could only come from the pen of a melodramatic thriller writer. As Nick himself says before he and Hillary nervously turn towards the camera; "I'm not the first guy who fell in love with a woman he met at a restaurant who turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist only to lose her to her childhood lover who she last saw on a deserted island who then turned out fifteen years later to be the leader of the French underground."""
Laugh out loud if the classic Zucker comedy is your style, and I could go on forever; 'Is this the Potato Farm?' 'Yes, I'm Albert Potato', 'Let me know if there's any change in his condition... he's dead', 'there is sauerkraut in my leederhausen'.