Hot Shots!

 Top Secret! was the last movie both written and directed by all three members of the comedy specialist trio consisting of Jim Abrahams and brothers Jerry and David Zucker (ZAZ from here on). All three would write for the first Naked Gun film together, and then pretty much go their separate ways.

 Jerry Zucker would go on to have the most successful, varied post-ZAZ career: He'd find mainstream success with Ghost, and then try his hand at both drama (First Knight) and slightly less wacky comedy (the lackluster Rat Race remake). He'd also help his brother out with scripting duties on the dreadful third Scary Movie sequel, but the less said about that the better.

 His compatriots would both fitfully try to keep ZAZ formula alive. David Zucker with diminishing returns - starting with the very funny but more traditional BASEketball, then going through increasingly worse Scary Movie sequels, all the way to the mind-numbingly unfunny Republican propaganda piece An American Carol. It was Jim Abrahams who'd come closest to recapturing the old magic with his Hot Shots! films. He was the only one who remembered to end the title with an exclamation mark.

 Hot Shots is a fairly spot-on, affectionate parody of Top Gun; Only five years after the fact, which sounds like a lot but is much closer to the source than Top Secret! is to Casablanca and the Elvis movies it sends up.

 In true ZAZ fashion, the film switches frequently to more then-current targets: The Fabulous Baker Boys, Dances With Wolves, 9 1/2 Weeks... and a whole lot of cultural potshots that haven't aged all that well.

 Charlie Sheen stands in for Tom Cruise as Topper Harley, a maverick loner with daddy issues who's nonetheless clearly the best pilot who ever lived. "He's so complex!" two co-pilots breathlessly exclaim, awe-struck, after he rebuffs them when they get too friendly. Hot Shots might pull most of its punches when making fun of Top Gun, but it clearly understands it very well.

 Topper falls for Ramada (a very game, ridiculously beautiful Valeria Golino), the air base shrink who, in a very funny gag, stamps Topper's papers with a "paternal conflict syndrome" after a very short interview with him. Ramada is romantically involved with the movie's version of Iceberg (Cary Elwes), who's also turned into a sort of Baxter figure once Topper enters the picture.
 Will Topper overcome his trauma to lead his mission to success despite some evil corporate types trying to sabotage it? The plot, as scripted by Abrahams and frequent collaborator Pat Proft, is only slightly less ridiculous than Top Gun's, but a lot funnier.

 It's a weird little film. I haven't seen these as many times as I have the classic ZAZ movies, but my memories of it were mostly corroborated: I remembered it as being pretty uneven, and lo and behold, it is. There's a ton of truly great jokes and sight gags - mostly clustered in short runs in the segments where the film zeroes in on a parodic target. The beginning is a great example: A pretty faithful rendition of the Top Gun theme, dovetailing into butt-rock as the activity on an aircraft carrier gets sillier and sillier. The scene is tinted orange in a good approximation of Tony Scott's most enduring visual contribution to cinema, but here two people carrying bombs over their shoulders smash the warheads together, baggage trains weave between the fighters, and someone cooks a sausage on a jet exhaust. Most of the gags aren't all that funny on paper, but the execution counts for a lot, and so does the fact that they come at a relentless clip. The film manages this feat several times, and it remains extremely funny every single time.

 I'm less enthused about the film's more traditional comedy; a lot of the humour there is pretty weak, and a lot of it just fails completely. Some gags are lessened by ADR work, with some silly comment being overdubbed over the action, as if they weren't sure the joke would land otherwise. Very corny.
 There's no getting over all of that, but the fact is that, as in most classic ZAZ films, there's such a density of gags of all sorts that a string of groaners will still give way to a genuine laugh sooner rather than later.

 Those laugh-free stretches do feel longer than on other, similar movies, though - including the sequel to this one. In exchange Hot Shots! feels more traditional, more coherent, but I'd happily take a more disjointed feel if that's the price for more absurdist jokes and ridiculous asides.

 The acting is exactly as awful as the material demands. Everyone is good, but Sheen in particular made me laugh just with some of his facial expressions, especially in the 'sexy' parts. Lloyd Bridges gets saddled with some of the most painfully unfunny conceits, which is a shame, but he still manages some classic scenes - including a genuinely hilarious version of that most trod on of spoofs, the Patton speech ("I've personally flown 194 missions and I was shot down in every one. Come to think of it, I've never landed a plane in my life!")

 The Hot Shots! films would be the last hurrah for ZAZ-style comedy. There'd be some others from other directors, some of them decent, even - but I've never really revisited any of them, which I think says a lot.

 That's until Spy Hard gave us the ZAZ replacement we deserve but definitely didn't need or ask for: Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who would use it as a springboard to a decades-long cinematic crime spree with their (x) Movie series; Each and every one of them a perfect demonstration of just how badly you can fuck up the ZAZ formula.

Top Secret!

 I first saw Top Secret! when I was twelve years old. That is, of course, the perfect age for this sort of thing to burrow out permanent habitation in your brain (see also: Weird Al Yankovic and MAD magazine). At this point I know it well enough that I don't find it all that funny anymore, even as I appreciate the density of its visual gags and puns and how far it's willing to go to get a laugh. It's become comfort viewing, and that kind of sucks.

 In all of the films written and directed, like this one, by the trio of Jim Abrahams plus brothers Jim and Jerry Zucker, the plot is barely a hook to hang as many jokes as possible. But by spoofing two genres at once - wartime espionage and Elvis Prestley films - the story here is almost schematic, relying more on our familiarity with the tropes in play than on any actual connective tissue to flow from scene to scene.

 And... it doesn't matter. It's always clear (more so than on Airplane! or Naked Gun) that the story takes a distant back seat to any sight gag, non-sequitur, cheesy pun or quick joke that gets within range. The sheer breadth and amount of humour on display is pretty impressive; All of these movies are known for having jokes going on both in the foreground and the background, often at the same time, but I think Top Secret! is probably the one that manages to squeeze in the most -if maybe not the best- gags. I mean, it even manages to sneak a (dumb) joke into its title, what with that exclamation mark.

 The best news is that it's not at all quantity over quality when it comes to its jokes. I mean, sure, there are a lot of groaners in there, but a surprising amount land. There's some real wit on display and a surrealist streak in both incidental gags (where the characters scare off parked bicycles as if they were horses at the hitching rail) and set pieces like the film's most infamous scene (a rendition of The Nutcracker where the dancers twirl around with raging boners).

 Incidentally: the (non-sensical) pun that functions as the raison d'etre for that scene does not translate to Spanish. I spent years thinking it was just another non-sequitur, until I saw it in English.

 

 Even the dumber jokes are often rescued by leaning into their idiocy: You might see the punchline coming after a setup ("Oh, I know a little German!"), but it's still funny when it's delivered with such cheesy verve (a dwarf in lederhosen stands up and starts waving). And there are some true classics in there, like a throwaway gag where our protagonist, crawling through a field, is confronted with a pair of boots; When he looks up, with a raising pedestal shot following his line of sight, he discovers that it's just that - a pair of nazi boots, no nazi wearing them, and he sighs in relief. Amazing.

 Elsewhere you get optical illusions, dumb details that barely count as humour but might still draw an appreciative chuckle (such as a helmet strap that stays on after the soldier takes off the helmet), some fun references, and plain old fashioned slapstick. Seriously, it's quite the spread.

 It's also nice to see a film like this with relatively decent production values. Enough that when a scene calls for an underwater saloon brawl - you know, that old standard - it can deliver in fairly impressive fashion.

  Val Kilmer stars as the Elvis stand-in (his first role) against Lucy Gutteridge, who plays the local resistance member he tries to woo. The film was shot in England (an early Beach Boys spoof, for example, was shot in Cornwall of all places!) and it features a horde of British actors - most notably Peter Cushing in a bit part in one of the film's most elaborate sequences*. Omar Shariff also puts in an extended appearance, and is involved in a really low-brow joke that I remember made my father huff in disapproval. For Shame, Mr. Shariff!

 No one really makes an impression besides Kilmer, who wholly commits to the role and also sings all of the songs in the soundtrack. Everyone else is, like the plot, pretty much just a joke dispensing machine.

 As a grown-up I recognize that both Airplane! and Naked Gun are better, possibly funnier ZAZ movies. But you know what? Fuck that; Top Secret! is still my favorite. Latrine!

*Fun fact: The cast mold taken of Cushing's head for this movie was retrieved thirty-odd years later and used to bring him back as a creepy digital puppet on Rogue One. This would be one of his final (in-person) roles, but not the last - that honour belongs to that weird Biggles movie, which I should really revisit one of these days.