Top Secret! (1984)

If you try and ignore this "Spy" offering from the Airplane team, you won't last long. When it's on your TV screen there'll soon be something so outrageously daft that you have to at least stare in dismay and amazement.

Yes, it's a pity it hasn't got Leslie Nielsen at the helm but the young Elvis-sort of looking Val Kilmer is good, but not brilliant. It's just not in the class of the best Abrahams and Zucker's, especially the fore- mentioned Airplane, hence my four stars.

Sent off to cold-war East Germany and playing rock'n'roll to an audience not yet immersed in such, at a concert that aims to unite west and east Berlin, Nick Rivers (Kilmer) encounters an array of mishaps, from the outset. Naturally, the opposite sort of happens and I'd like to say that plot details are fairly useless here and they're pointless in a script where gag after gag is out for laughs, most of them hitting some spot, or another. There's Omar Sharif as you've never seen, or ever thought you'd see him and a turn from Peter Cushing, too.

Venturing into a parody of WWII films, including The Great Escape, it ends up with a herd of cows wearing wellington boots...What happens between is fast and funny and whilst Top Secret isn't the funniest thing you'll see, it's good and worthy of including in the 'ones to see'.