It all sounds like some bad movie. And it is.

Rating: 3/10 (7 August 2010)

Spoof movies, which parody some existing film or genre, have a long history (several of the British "Carry On" series fall into this category), but they were particularly popular in the seventies and eighties, the period which saw some of Mel Brooks' finest work such as "Blazing Saddles" (which parodies the Western) and "High Anxiety" (the films of Alfred Hitchcock) as well as the likes of "Naked Gun" (cop thrillers), "Airplane!" (disaster movies) and "The Big Bus" (ditto).
"Top Secret!" is another film of this type. It tells the story of Nick Rivers, an American rock star who travels to East Germany to perform at a cultural festival but while there becomes involved in espionage and in a plot by the East German regime to sink the entire NATO fleet. He meets the beautiful Hillary Flammond and helps her to rescue her father, a brilliant scientist being held by the regime and forced against his will to build the deadly mine which will be used in the attack. We are informed that the name Hillary is German for "She Whose Bosoms Defy Gravity", a piece of information of dubious veracity but one that seems appropriate to the striking Lucy Gutteridge. (Less so, perhaps, to America's current Secretary of State).
In their efforts Nick and Hillary have the assistance of the French Resistance. (You can tell they are French because of their accents and because they all have names like "Déjà Vu", "Escargot" and "Chocolate Mousse"). Now anyone with even a token knowledge of history might ask what the French Resistance are doing in 1980s East Germany (a country apparently still ruled by the Nazis), but this is one of those films which are made both by and for those whose knowledge of European history, geography, culture and politics is somewhat less than token. (In other words for about 90% of the US market). I could fill my entire review with a list of goofs (about the only thing they get right is the distinctly unfeminine looks of the East German women's athletics squad), but there would be little point as the film-makers are clearly not aiming for an accurate portrayal of life in the German Democratic Republic, any more than Mel Brooks intended "Blazing Saddles" to be a true-to-life picture of the Old West. Spoof movies are not generally the place to go if you are looking for factual accuracy.
Spoof movies are, however, normally regarded as one of the places to go to if you are looking for laughs, and this is unfortunately a department in which "Top Secret" is sadly lacking. It is a parody that never knows what it is supposed to be parodying. It starts off as an obvious parody of spy films, both of the James Bond type as well as of more serious offerings such as "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", but with the introduction of the Resistance it turns into a spoof of war films, especially those set in Nazi-occupied Europe. (There are obvious references to "Casablanca" and the motorcycle scene from "The Great Escape"). The fact that Nick is a rock star also allows the film-makers to aim at Elvis films and sixties beach movies (surely a rather outdated target by 1984). Bizarrely, at one point it even turns into a satire on the Brooke Shields version of "The Blue Lagoon", a film so bad as to be beyond parody, and ends with a blatant reference to "The Wizard of Oz".
One of the faults of "The Big Bus" was its scattergun approach, aiming at too many targets and missing most of them, but "Top Secret" is even worse; it aims at even more targets and misses all of them. There are some occasionally funny visual gags, but most of the jokes are either feeble, corny or tasteless. (Man being raped by a bull, Nick's manager and his "anal intruder"). To describe the plot as "nonsense" would be to credit it with more coherence than it actually possesses.
There is one memorable line. At one point, after recounting her highly improbable life history to Nick, Hillary says, "It all sounds like some bad movie". You said it, girl, you said it. I couldn't have put it better myself. 3/10