Top Secret!

Having spoofed one genre with considerable success, the Airplane team cast their net wider to send up a host of venerable movie chestnuts. Set in a peculiar national and temporal limbo, it has US teen rock idol Nick Rivers (Kilmer) travelling to Nazified East Germany to entertain culturally deprived Iron Curtain bobby-soxers. The gags come thick, fast and arbitrary - surfing gags, Pacman gags, Steve McQueen Great Escape gags - all aimed at the belly or lower, with a variable strike rate. The first half chugs along quite happily, but whereas in Airplane the jokes could simply be strung on a hand-me-down storyline, here the demands of the plot start to play havoc with the levity. Signs of desperation have begun to creep in some time before the end.