Top Secret (1984)

When I first loaded up my Netflix queue with Val Kilmer movies in order to begin The Kilmer Project, I was hopeful. But by the time "Top Secret" arrived I was beginning to have second thoughts about the whole experiment. Here's a 1984 movie that I had never heard of and wasn't especially fondly remembered by critics. I wondered how much of this I would actually want to suffer through. Within five minutes of "Top Secret" I knew I had made the right choice.

This comedy tells the implausible story of a spy ring in East Germany that attempts to stop the Germans from gaining a weapon of mass destruction by rescuing a kidnapped scientist. Val Kilmer plays a US rock star whose big hit is called "Skeet Surfin'" which is the passtime of grabbing a twelve gauge shotgun and a surfboard and heading out onto the waves to shoot at clay pigeons launched from the beach. It's bizaare. The whole movie is in that campy sort of joke-a-minute slapstick political spoof that would later manifest itself in the Hot Shots movies of the 90s. The writers mine as many jokes as they can out of the idea of East Germany being a Stalinist police state. Ha! The cold war! Hilarious! Apparently almost all of the German dialouge is actually Yiddish which substitutes surprisingly well, though judging by the IMDB Trivia page it's kind of a lot inside jokes for the handful of the surving Yiddish speakers in the world. Otherwise it's a lot of kind of crude but PG-13 humor that you might expect in an 80s gagfest such as this.

As for Kilmer, apparently he is actually singing the goofy songs that his Elvis/Beach Boys character performs throughout the movie and he was even featured on the soundtrack performing under his character's name (Nick Rivers). His hair is immaculately feathered in the finest of 80s fashion (though I noted a continuity problem where he got an unexplained haircut about halfway through) and his Elvis-ish rock star role is played as a sort of earnest frat boy. Some of the songs in this movie are so weird that they're kind of worth hearing.

Ultimately the movie is the furthest thing from timeless. It's got jokes about the Ford Pinto and the Carter administration. Honestly, I'm not even sure if kids growing up today would even understand the whole East Germany/Soviet Bloc cold war stuff. Nonetheless, this was Kilmer's first big role and a great start to The Kilmer Project.