I want to explain. What's there to explain? Look, I'm not the first guy who fell in love with a girl he met in a restaurant, who then turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist, only the loser to a childhood lover who she'd last seen on a deserted island, and who turned out 15 years later to be the leader of the French underground.

I know it. It all sounds like some bad movie.

And the two characters break the fourth wall and look straight at us, the audience, like, in a slow turn. In a very slow turn, but a very funny one.

It is very funny. This is an exquisite moment in a very silly movie.

It is silly.

And you know, it's interesting because it is like a firehose of silly. You know, in a way that it's... You know, Paul. You know, Javi. I think that you and I are probably going to have a very interesting conversation about this movie because of the subjectivity of comedy. And I bet we're not going to agree on what everything is that is funny in this film. This is Top Secret. Top Secret exclamation point. And like most things that have an exclamation point as a parody, it kind of is a musical, isn't it?

It is. I did not recall how much singing there was in this film, how many musical numbers.

Yes, yes.

That alternately move the story forward and drive it to a screeching halt.

And don't. But OK, well, you know, on that note, let me just say that I'm Javier Grillo-Marxuach.

And I'm Cheval. I mean, Paul Alvarado-Dykstra.

And this is.

Multiplex Overthruster, Summer of 84.

All right. So I think I've said it before, but I'll say it again. We're looking at a movie called Top Secret. Yes. It is the second film by the team of Zucker, Abraham Zucker. They made Airplane! Quite famously. And this is sort of their second attempt at doing one of these like firehose of comedy movies, where it's just every scene is a gag, every scene is a gag within. It's like Dune. It's like gags within gags, you know? Yes.

I was actually going to say one of my questions I was going to pose is that, is this a fountain or a firehose of frivolity?

I think it's a firehose, because I think like a firehose, you know, a fountain is pretty, like a firehose is getting the job done like with great intensity.

Also, a firehose can be overwhelming and very difficult to control.

Oh, yes. Much like this film.

Yes.

Yeah. So, let's just get into it. So, Paul, now, where did you see Top Secret? Did you see it in the theater? Was this something that you caught on cable? How did this movie come to you?

I was, I did not get away with seeing this film in a theater in my early youth. I must have seen it. I have vague memories of seeing it maybe once. Either on cable or VHS, but I had a just kind of a loose impressionistic memory of, and of moments of this film, kind of a patchwork Swiss cheese memory of this. So this was a very surreal experience seeing this film, because I found myself questioning, have I ever seen this entire movie before? Because there are parts I did not remember, but it might just be a testament to the unevenness of the film.

Well, here's the thing, this is one of those movies that was on the movie channel constantly.

Yeah, so you could easily flip to it, and like, I'll just settle in and watch parts of it, because it's funny.

Yeah, and it's one of those movies that you remember most because of the bits that land, then it is because you remember the entire experience of it being great. Unlike Airplane!, which literally everybody remembers seeing Airplane! for the first time, but it was also the first time anybody saw Airplane! and anybody saw a movie like this, right?

Yes, and in contrast to Airplane!, and not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but just to take a, let's say, high-altitude look.

Like a 10,000, 15,000, whatever it takes.

Airplane!

220, 110, whatever it takes.

Yeah, I think benefits from focus in terms of that it is spoofing one thing.

And one thing largely.

Yes.

This film, I think, is trying to do too many things.

Oh, it's doing everything. It is doing so many things, Paul. It is. Producer Brad, when and where did you see this movie? What's your, do you have a history with this film?

I think I saw it in the theater, but I think this is when the film said, my friends and I watched a lot and quoted a lot, whether I'm VHS or in cable, because we all just kept saying the lines over and over in high school.

This movie reminds me of SCTV, which I love, and this is not a slam on SCTV. It reminds me of SCTV in that SCTV was always funnier when you talked about it with your friends afterwards than it was when you were actually watching it, you know? It was one of those things that gave you tons of crap to talk about with your friends, and then when you got into it, you realized how funny it all was, but when you were actually watching it, you were like, it's more like, you were like, oh, that's really funny.

Yeah.

So, okay, Top Secret is the rollicking standup into your story of American pop star Mick Rivers played by Val Kilmer.

Nick.

Nick. Nick, oh yeah, because his father thought about it while he was shaving, yeah, I remember the joke about the name, yes. So anyway, Nick is invited to East Germany, which doesn't exist anymore, so already anyone under 40 who didn't go to, who went to public school isn't going to understand this movie. And that was a slam on the American education system, gentlemen. See those that, because anyway. Okay. So Nick is invited to a cultural festival in East Germany where he's going to present American rock and roll music, but he winds up falling into a plot of, into a plot by the East German High Command to blast a mine in the streets of Gibraltar, destroying NATO. They've kidnapped a scientist to build this mine whom Nick winds up in prison, winds up meeting the scientist and getting involved with the French Resistance, who somehow are part of this film. In their plot to counter the attack on NATO and hijinks and musical numbers and espionage ensue. This film is a spoof of Elvis movies, World War II movies, spy movies, and about 20 other genres that I can't even, don't even come to, romance movies, everything.

It has cows in...

It has cows in army boots.

It has so many crazy things.

Paul, this movie is going to defeat us in terms of trying to like, like, like, like, let's just get into it. Let's see, let's ring the bell and see what we can get into here.

Yes, yes, please.

Ding, ding.

All right, I want to start with, first of all, this movie starts with Omar Sharif.

Yes, the great, the great Omar Sharif.

What is he doing?

It's kind of like, what is he doing in this movie? Oh my God. But I imagine that having Omar Sharif in this movie is kind of like having Leslie Nielsen in an airplane. I mean, Leslie Nielsen was like a leading man, you know, that was kind of, but Omar Sharif is a legend. I don't, how did this even happen?

Well, and it's strange because it's Omar Sharif kind of playing vaguely a cross between James Bond, but also so much of this film is World War II coded.

Yes, it's true. For some weird reason. He's a Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca also, right?

And yes, there's also the bunch of Casablanca in this. It is this weird combination of different milieus that it's blending, and I don't think it works. It's kind of a mess.

But here's the thing. This movie is weird. It doesn't look, let's just admit this movie, but we're here to break down the movie, not take down.

No, no, no.

It is a lot of fun, but it is also on drugs.

One of the things about this movie that I think is so great is that, and it's one of the things that makes it not great, but I think it is great, is that this movie is constantly making fun of visual tropes from war movies and old timey movies in general. So this scene with Omar Sharif starts with, he's on a train.

And he's fighting on the top of a train.

Yes.

And he's fighting the tall East German guy, looks just like-

Who is very coded like a Nazi, like all the East Germans-

All the East Germans are coded like Nazis.

Yeah, it is a Cold War movie, a comedy-

In which the East Germans are Nazis.

But so much of it is still clinging to World War II kind of symbolism and imagery and-

Kind of like America. Oh, oh God, did I say that? Never mind.

Sorry. And at what point, at this point in the film, when did you think this movie was taking place?

During World War II. Well, I mean, I don't know, because it's like, yeah, it looks like World War II, but it's like, yeah, I don't know.

It's very confusing, which I know maybe it's intentional.

And it's a steam train. Also, so this is another thing I just want to point out that I'm fascinated by, and I've forgotten about, I probably knew and forgotten, then didn't look up, and I was like, oh, this is what main credits are for. This film has a score by Maurice Jarre.

Maurice Jarre of all people, right?

Of Lawrence of Arabia.

Did you see the production design?

Yeah, the production design by Peter freaking Lamont of the Bond movies.

Wow, okay, yeah. Well, no, because this movie was obviously shot at Pinewood, and all the actors are British actors that you've gotten to know much better since, by the way.

Yeah.

But anyway, look, what I want to say is, this opening part with Omar Shah, he's fighting a guy who looks like Robert Shaw from Russia with Love on top of the train, and it's that thing where the arch is coming, and the guy who's facing the direction of the train is going in, sees the arch. So Omar Sharif ducks. Of course, the East German guy is still standing there.

The big Burleys German guy.

And usually, the arch takes out the other guy because his back has turned to the arch, right?

In this case, the guy literally, the guy goes straight through the arch. He literally demolishes the arch.

He's just standing there. The arch goes slightly, I mean, half of this movie, you can't describe these sight gags, but literally the arch just disintegrates around his body because he just hits it so hard. And that's how you find out this guy is that strong. And yeah.

And that Sharif knows there's no way he can take him. So he basically then just jumps off the train to escape.

I don't even know what is happening in this.

But here what I think is effective about this, very quickly in this opening scene, as confusing as it is in terms of setting, whatever, you immediately set a very specific bar in terms of the absurdity level.

Oh, God. Yeah, absolutely.

It's that it's basically telling you right from out of the gate. We are not. This is not in the real world. Do not take this seriously. No, this is going to be a cartoon. It's so over the top.

In case you bought a ticket, not knowing that the people who made Airplane! made this film. Let's just get you in the in the mood. Now, Paul, here's what comes next. And I just, I just... The next scene is the Nazis. We might as well call them Nazis. Because they're dressed like Nazis. The helmets are Frech helmets. It's like they just don't have swastikas. It's supposed to be East Germany.

Well, they have like the two little stripes that are sort of a minimalist SS symbol.

Yeah, okay. So, they're planning their master stroke. And producer Brad, can we hear clip number one, please?

As long as the attention of the world is firmly fixed on our cultural festival, no one will know what is about to happen. And once again, Germany will become united under one rule. Ours, after Sunday, there will be no one to stop us.

This is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen in a movie theater.

And one of the most insane.

It is insane. So the Nazis have just found out that Nick Rivers is coming.

They put on the record.

And that a British agent, Omar Sharif, has escaped.

Yes. Yes.

But here's the thing.

Omar Sharif has escaped. Nick Rivers is coming. And they've put on the record of Nick Rivers. So that monologue takes place while the record is queuing up. So he says, nobody will be able to stop us. And then they'll look at the record player and this Beach Boys parody starts. And the music video for the Beach Boys parody starts. And it's Skeet Surfin, which is...

We cut to a Southern California beach and coming over the dunes. Yes. Is this just like a horde of surfers with a surfboard under one arm and a shotgun in the other.

And the premise of it is that the new craze that's sweeping the nation is Skeet Surfin, where you literally go out on your surfboard with your shotgun and fire at clay pigeons thrown by women in bikinis. And so there's about four different Skeet Surfin songs here.

Javi, why did this never catch on? How is this not an Olympic event?

Paul, the beautiful thing about the sequence is that it shows you why it didn't catch on, because this is the entire title sequence. This is where we find out about Peter Lamont and Maurice Jarre and all of the classy people involved in this movie. But the music video is telling its own story, because it starts with all the fun people out in the surfboards, but then it goes kind of dark and they start shooting things that start falling on people.

Including a plane.

Yes, they shoot down a plane. And people are running away from the shotgun blasts. I mean, you get the sense that this board was not wildly thought out.

Chaos ensues.

Paul, this is, I'm sorry. Funny is funny. I watched this and it hits so many of my, I don't love the Beach Boys necessarily. I do love Brian Wilson, which is, by the way, like, this is a masterful parody.

Well, this is what's funny is that, in retrospect, this movie feels like a Weird Al movie.

It really does.

In many, many places.

It feels more like UHF than it does like Airplane! weirdly.

Yes.

Because it's more of a genre parody than it is like, anyway, yeah, go on.

Yeah, yeah. And it's startling because, again, it's this collision of references and milieus that we're just kind of whip panning from World War II-coded East German Nazi war room to California surfing. But then also, now it's even more pointed of a parody or satire of American gun culture than it was then. It's just wild.

Paul, this movie works best for me. When I look at this movie, I think this is a movie that's a parody of how Americans view the world. And if you look at it that way, how Americans in the 70s and 80s, it literally is a valentine to American ignorance.

Especially the Germans and the East Germans in the 80s.

Of politics, of everything. So of course it's a parody of American gun culture because it's completely not well thought out. It's like Apocalypse now. They had too many people, too much money, too much equipment, and they slowly went insane. It's nuts. But the other thing I look at this, Paul, it's like in 20 years, is anyone even going to understand what this movie is? Because all the pop culture references here are the pop culture references of boomers. They're not even our pop culture references. These are baby boomers giving Gen X their cultural references. There are jokes in this movie that aren't going to make sense to people because the technology that they're making fun of doesn't even exist popularly anymore.

And the movies that they're referencing from a generation prior are not known anymore. Nope. Yeah, there's so much of the film's jokes, structure, and references and gags. You can kind of see it disintegrating and evaporating before your eyes when you watch the film now, because it's like, oh yeah, this is not going to hold up.

You can just feel context vanishing as you watch this film. It's kind of metaphysically quite interesting. Paul, so now we know the Nazis have an evil plan. Now we know Nick Rivers is going to East Germany.

And we know who Nick Rivers is. So this establishes his weird identity, which is that he is a rock star in 1984 by...

Singing Beach Boys songs.

By doing Beach Boys-esque songs.

Yes.

That makes no sense.

But it's 1984, but synths haven't arrived yet.

I know. It could not musically be more anti-80s.

He's Elvis Presley singing Beach Boys songs.

Yeah. Because...

It makes no goddamn sense.

Because so Javi... This is so striking to me. We have seen some movies that have been... Yes, we have. But that have just been so strikingly, viscerally 80s. Yes. And particularly when it comes to music, whether that is The Hunger, whether that is Valley Girl, Risky Business, Tangerine Dream, I mean, it's like, you know...

Yeah, Repo Man with the punk rock.

Iconically 80s and a variety of music. This film leans so hard into being a musical, but it is so in complete denial and refusal and rejection of what was contemporary 80s music at the time.

I have an interesting theory about that.

Airplane! is a parody of disaster movies, right? Disaster movies were popular when Airplane! was made. You had Airport, which was made in 1970, Airport 75, which was, Airport 77, and then Airport 79, the Concord, the year that movie... The audience knew that genre very well. This is like, this is like, literally the movies that people who made this movie grew up watching on black and white TV.

Not what was popular currently in theaters.

Exactly, exactly.

So what I think would have worked better, and again, this is the most unfair criticism to make of a film.

Is it had it been made at a different time by different people, perhaps in a different manner?

No, I'll take just one of those.

All right, let's hit it.

You're making a movie called Top Secret. You have this impossibly good-looking and charming lead in Val Kilmer. You've got Peter freaking Lamont as your production designer. You've got your Pinewood, all this stuff. Do a full-on bond, a spoof, and because Austin Powers is decades away.

That's true. By the way, and I don't even know what Austin Powers is a spoof of. Anyway, let's continue.

We are at a fulcrum because we just had double dose bond. Right.

You had never seen ever again an octopussy. Yes, of course.

There's been a super saturation of bond in the zeitgeist, as well as a critical massive accumulation of bond cinematic awareness. I feel like that lack of focus is such a missed opportunity.

Well, you know what? In appropo of which, let's focus back on the movie we are watching though, Paul.

Yes. We're on a train.

No, we're off the train.

We're in a car now. We're still.

You got to get us off the train, Paul.

No.

We're on a train with Nick Rivers, Javi.

Okay. Never mind. Never mind.

And his manager, who is completely superfluous. And Nick is a multitasker. He is a renaissance man. What are the two activities he is partaking in?

Nick is learning German from a tape and he's also, he's also a painting. He's doing a painting, a life study of what's going on outside the window. But it's a landscape, but since he's on a train, it's all blurry, which is a very funny gag. And the German, no, no, like the German are all phrases, like, there was sauerkraut in my Lederhosen. Something that I would say to my mother all the time. It's very weird after seeing this film.

An essential for any traveler.

Essential. And they're talking about the festival, right?

Also, there is a little foreshadowing of the most uncomfortably inappropriate dimension of the film.

Oh my God, yes.

And of our lead character.

Yes, yes.

Because when he's asked about how is German's coming, basically, by his manager, the one lesson he relates, the phrase he's learned, is how to ask, is your daughter 18?

Uh-huh. Yep. Yep.

And this does not aged well. And it gets worse later.

As usual, look, we just might as well. We might as well discuss the homophobia in the room. This movie has a lot of a lot of jokes about gay people. Uh, it's got a, and they're sort of like that kind of sneering.

And like winking towards pedophilia.

Yeah. And that, yeah. Especially in one song that's performed later.

Yeah. Yeah.

There's a, there's a, there's a cup of some of the humor in this movie is a little bit, yeah, especially. Once we get to the East German national, the East German, it's, it's, it's nuts.

But then at the same time, it swings to, they get, they get, uh, their cabin gets infiltrated by German police, secret police, but who look like the army, asking their papers. And there's a little bit of thing back and forth. And then, uh, Rivers, uh, punctuates the scene in, in American freedom-loving defiance with a phrase in German that shocks and infuriates, uh, the, the, the police slash soldiers, but they know they, they, they can't touch him. He's a VIP. He's going to perform at the Cultural Festival. And the manager asked, what did you say to them?

And he says, oh, yeah, he said, I said I would sign them up for the mailing list for the Montgomery Awards catalog. Yes. And that's apparently causing an incident.

Yes.

I remember that. By the way, again, who the hell knows what a catalog is?

Montgomery Awards.

Nope.

Nope.

Now, look, when I was a kid and this movie came out, you know, like we would get the Montgomery Awards catalog in the mail. The Sears catalog.

The Sears catalog, and that's how it...

Amazon was a book back then.

Javi, do you harbor any nostalgic memories of the Montgomery Award and Sears catalogs, particularly the Christmas wish books?

Paul, here's the thing about the Christmas wish book. Now, I lived in Puerto Rico for the first 10 years of my life, and we did not get everything there. You know, like it's a small island, things had to be brought in, not everything. So the wish book was like a lifeline to, like, just to just the abundance of the United States of America. It was literally from Puerto Rico, you would get the wish book, and it was like, this is the land of opportunity. That's what the Sears wish book meant to me. How about you?

I think that you can draw a direct line and intersection in terms of peak Reagan era capitalism to those just abundantly glorious Christmas wish book catalogs. And they were holy relics in my household, at least for me. That was my Bible.

I kept my Christmas wish book, I kept it all, I would look at it all year round and look at the toys and everything. Yes, well, and as soon as it arrived, I might have learned English from it.

Yeah, it's like now they start playing Christmas music in October before even Halloween or something. It's obscene, but I recall like the sense that when the Christmas wish books would arrive in the mail, then you knew Christmas season had begun and immediately, I just dropped everything as a small child and I would meticulously go through them and there were multiple ones because there were Sears, Montgomery Award, another one I'm forgetting about, JCPenney, Best Products, Service Merchandise, yeah, absolutely. And I would go through meticulously with a notepad and a, like a legal pad and a pencil because I was going to make changes and I would go through and I would dog ear pages and I would circle the things that I wanted and I would make my Christmas wish list to quote unquote Santa. But here's what I did because I was like, I want to do my part and be considerate, is I would do price comparisons between the catalogs. And so on my wish list, I would list the page number, but get it from the other catalog and where the best price is for the thing that I wanted. So, because I wanted to be...

You're a good son. You want your parents slash Santa to make sure they get the most bang for the buck, right?

That's a charitable way to look at that. All right. But yes, I have just really strong sense memories of that whole ritual.

It's fascinating that we should talk about that, Paul. First of all, I mean, look, this movie doesn't have a lot of plot. We're going to get into it. And we're going to figure out a way of getting through this movie without going beat by beat because it's just gag after gag after gag.

Real quick, the 1984 Sears catalog, the sweepstakes you could win was a 1985 Dodge Lancer ES.

Ooh, a Lancer.

Oh, man. Speaking of cars, there's a very pointed Ford Pinto side gag in this film.

Oh my God. But Paul, that's the thing about this movie.

But again, no one's going to get it.

This movie is like literally, you're literally watching this movie disappear into the ether as you watch this movie. Like literally the pop culture references, the things this movie is making fun of are vanishing. And generationally, like if you're under 40 and you start watching this movie based on this podcast.

Half this movie will make no sense.

It's just going to go straight over your head.

Yeah. It's like, why are they doing that? It's like, I don't have time to explain.

Now Paul, Nick Rivers arrives in East Germany, right?

After a kind of annoying and too long Pac-Man map gag.

Oh my God. So it's like the Indiana Jones map, right? We're doing it in East Berlin. Like you see the illustrated map. You see the little animated line.

Yeah, of the airplane or the train.

And then it goes bigger and bigger.

And then suddenly you're like at the airport.

And then you're seeing like the dots going through the city street. And then suddenly it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then it's a Pac-Man game. And the ghost is great.

It goes on forever.

I don't even know how to describe this gag visually, you know?

It's maybe the most timely gag they did at the time. But at the same time, and you got to know that they were just like high-fiving themselves about, oh, this is genius. We're geniuses. This is going to be amazing. It is dead. It is like dead on the street.

But Paul, that's the thing about this movie. This movie, like literally the gag, like they'll have a gag and they'll just stay on the gag just in case you didn't get it. Like they'll hang out.

It's...

I got to say I liked it because I'm so far removed from Pac-Man. I didn't see this coming where in 1984 I would have.

That's true.

That's true.

It probably surprised me.

Yes. Look, I think also one of the things I look at this movie and I just find it hilarious is like I just like the surrealism of it and I like kind of like even if it doesn't make me laugh, I look at it and go, holy Toledo that took balls to put on screen just to get that... There's one gag in this movie, Paul.

Oh, yes.

That I literally wrote down best sight gag ever. And by the way, I want to go on the record for something.

I know which one you mean and I would agree it's at least a contender.

Is it the one in the prison with the mine, with the magnetic mine?

No. Oh, best sight gag ever.

That's up there.

I had forgotten that sight gag even existed.

And this is the other thing. The sight gags that they deploy in this film are not lacking in ambition. They take time and expense and production scale for something that's going to be so fleeting, but they spent enormous amount of time, energy, money and work on it.

Look, there's a moment in this movie, I'm not even going to do it when it happens, I can't even know what's happening in the movie when this moment happens, but there's a moment in this movie, Paul, where I don't even know who the characters are, they're in a park, okay? And behind them is a large statue of a pigeon. And it's like a big bronze, it's just a big statue of a pigeon.

Like a Kaiju pigeon.

Yeah, right? And then the scene ends, our characters walk off the scene and the camera stays on the pigeon, and then you notice that there's people sitting on top of the pigeon. And then they start flapping their hands and they fly off the pigeon.

Yes.

And then a guy comes by with a dog, and then the pigeon statue takes a giant shit. Yes. And I'm like, what are we even, what is this? It's like, did René Magritte come in and direct for a day? Like Tarantino in Sin City? What the fuck is happening? It's like literally, it's a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag. And by the time you get on the gag on the gag on the gag, you're like, what is this even a joke of?

No, it's insane. It is like an ouroboros of gags that just kind of keeps consuming itself. And it's like, why? To what end? No, just because we can't, because we feel like it.

So look, so Nick arrives in Germany. There is a ceremony where we hear the German National Anthem. The, sorry, East German National Anthem.

Yes.

Which is, which if you look at the end credits is based on the high school, on the high school fight song for the Zucker brothers, which is hilarious. The anthem is all about how they'll kill you if you try to escape. And then they're, and then in a joke that again, I'm sure was hilarious in 1984, they're presented the keys to the city by the East German Women's Something Team. Olympic Team. Yeah, and the gag quote unquote is that they're all men in women's clothing, because back then there was a rumor that the, that the communist-

There's more than a rumor of doping and of-

That the communist states were trying to sneak men into women's sports in order to goose up their gold medals.

Kind of like, and of hormonal enhancement.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And of performance enhancement and all that, yeah.

Sadly, in our day and age, it looks real transphobic over there.

Yes, yes.

Yeah. It's a gag that in context-

It's a cheap joke, and it's-

It's a cheap joke that in context was not necessarily transphobic, but when you get to today's day and age, it's like, oh, fuck, look at that, yeah, it's terrible.

Anyway.

So then Nick goes to this restaurant. Now look, look, he goes to the restaurant where he's the guest of honor, right?

There's a quick bit that is relatively important for the- Yes, Omar Sharif. Omar Sharif in the trench coat does this rendezvous with a blind gag gift street salesman.

Yes.

And it's just a bit on bit.

This bit goes on-

It goes way too long.

So it's supposed to be undercover, so every time somebody walks by, the guy playing the salesman goes, oh, try my exploding cigar. And he does it and of course it explodes on Omar Sharif.

Yes.

Oh, try my ink squirting flower.

So by the end of the thing, Omar Sharif looks like he's been roughed up, right?

Yes.

And at the end of it, he goes, oh, you forgot your fake dog poop. And the novelty guy goes, what fake dog poop? And Sharif is looking at it.

He just picked up dog poop.

The thing that's interesting about this scene is the guy playing the dog poop salesman. You know who that is, right?

Remind me.

That guy's name- Again, it's like this movie is a feast of actors that you saw, but don't remember, but remember, but see a billion times now that they're older. That guy is Ian McNeese, who played Winston Churchill in Doctor Who, who played Baron Harkonnen in the Sci-Fi Channel's mini-series version of Dune. He got a lot heavier later in life. And if you watch the TV show- Do you remember Rome, the HBO show? He was the town crier. Remember how they would cut to him giving the news? I love that guy. And I didn't realize he was young or that skinny.

Yeah. Yeah. But here's the thing. This is an example of like, it is an elaborate kind of bit and kind of a skit.

It goes on forever.

That's just dropped in the movie to convey one bit of plot information.

Yes.

And it's overly elaborate to do that. So all we really need to know out of the scene is that they're looking for Dr. Salmond, who has been conscripted and against his will to build a weapon for the East Germans. And so now Omar Sharif spy-

But is this where Omar Sharif goes off in the car and then he gets chased?

Well, he's going to be sent to a Howard Johnson's.

That's right. The Howard Johnson's.

Which we never see. We never see.

Does anyone under 40 recognize that gag? No.

I have such nostalgia for Howard Johnson's. Paul, Paul.

Okay. So I'm sorry. I got to get into this. I'm so sorry. Look, this might wind up being five hours long.

The junkyard? The junkyard?

No, no.

Howard Johnson's.

Yes.

Famous American roadside hotel and restaurant chain.

Coach us.

There was one in Puerto Rico. It was in San Juan. It was like the nice Howard Johnson's. We actually went there on Sundays. I just remember the cornbread being the best ever. Did they have? Do you remember any of this? I just remember when you went to the cashier to pay, they always had like little games and chocolates and stuff, and you'd try to get your parents to buy.

It was amazing.

I remember Clam Chowder.

Oh, the Clam Chowder, yes.

Howard Johnson's is still around, by the way.

It is?

Howard Johnson by Wyndham.

Oh, that's not.

Yeah, that doesn't count.

No, that's not.

Howard Johnson by Wyndham. That's like zombie Howard Johnson's.

Yeah, that's zombie Howard Johnson.

That's like, that's like Toys R Us.

I have very fond memories of long road trips from Texas to Michigan and getting to stop at a Howard Johnson's because he did not have them in the South. And it was this kind of mid-century styled oasis of civilization and comfort food and diners and just comfy booth seating.

You know, as, as you go ahead, go ahead, Paul.

I just, yeah, it just was, it was the best. And they had a little gift shop and you would get like chintzy little road games to play in the car.

Yeah, like a wooden games, like a game that was like a jigsaw game with like golf teams for plays.

You would flip over and then you could like have things to do, activities. Yeah. It just very warm and nostalgic.

I'll post a link to the Howard Johnson history of the show note.

Please do. I love that. Thank you, producer Brad. I think that's great. I think people should know about it because you know, look, I remember there was a Mad Men episode that was centered on a Howard Johnson's and I remember just even though it was horrible, it was like the best thing ever because I just remember the color of the, of the roof of the, but Paul, I think when we talk about this movie, the soothing soft color palette.

Yeah.

That light blue, bright orange. Yeah.

Just a staple of Americana.

But again, Paul, when we talk about that, that's the thing about this movie, when you talk about this movie is like everything this movie is about has vanished.

So many.

You know, and in a weird way, look, in a weird way, when you look at scary movie or you look at, you know, like the movies that are sort of the offshoots of this kind of film making, they're a lot more cynical, they're a lot meaner.

Yes.

You know, as mean as this movie can kind of get, it's, there's something very innocent and weirdly like Americana about it, looking back on it. Now, comedy has gotten so much different than what this movie is. You know, it's sort of, it's a very odd film because it just, what it refers to doesn't exist. It's about the pop culture references of much older people than we are. And the movie itself just feels like an object from another galaxy now. Yeah.

And the plot is just kind of loosely stringed together as a superstructure for them to hang gags on.

So, so now Omar Sharif, it's the word has gotten out that he's at the Howard Johnsons. He gets chased in a Citroen and he gets thrown into like a car grinder, one of those like junkyard, he is sort of a car compactor.

He is surprised to find himself driven not to the Howard Johnsons, but to a junkyard. And promptly his driver exits the car and a giant magnet descends on the roof and then pulls it up, moves it over, drops it into a car compactor and the car is crushed and compacted into basically a carry-on luggage bag, a sized debris.

They turn cars into cubes, right?

Yeah, and with Omar Sharif inside and presumably dead as a doornail, like there's no way anyone could survive.

And this will lead to yet another great side gag in this movie. Okay, look, Nick goes to this restaurant.

Fancy Pants restaurant.

Fancy Pants. Now, Paul, there is one gag the Zucker brothers and Abrahams are great at and it is my favorite gag. If you look at my TV show, The Middleman, I think I do it in every episode.

Happy for any excuse to revisit The Middleman.

I declare the gag, it's called Unfunny Foreground, Hilarious Background.

Yes. It is everywhere.

And it is my, oh my God, Paul. So, I mean, it is like literally two characters will be in the front talking about something very serious.

Yeah.

Right. So Nick Rivers, so Nick Rivers shows up at the restaurant and he's like in a leather jacket and looking like an American rock star. And they say, this is a five-star restaurant, sir, but we will furnish you with a jacket. So they take him to a room.

They require their dress code demands, admittance in a dinner jacket and a tie, meaning a tuxedo, a bow tie.

You think this is gonna be the usual comedy gag where they say, we will we will lend you a jacket and they bring him a jacket that doesn't fit. What they do is they take him to a back room that you can see through, it's a pair of glass doors. They take him to the glass doors. Now in the foreground, the maitre d and the German colonel and this Russian tenor who has shown up are talking about the reservations and the festival and that, well, in the background, Nick is getting undressed by like a team of tailors who are measuring him, right? And they're literally putting like patterns on his body and all of that. And then five seconds later, when the conversation in the foreground is done, he walks out and he's in a full talk.

They have tailored a tuxedo for him.

Right.

And how freaking great does Val Kilmer look in that tuxedo? And at this point, I'm looking at this movie and thinking, how was he not a massive movie star?

Let us address the homoeroticism in the room, shall we? Paul, has there ever been a human being as fucking beautiful as Val Kilmer in this movie? Holy crap.

He is up in the upper pantheon.

He's like the male Charlize Theron.

I neglected to look up how young he is in this film. I'm sure it's shocking. But he is oozing charisma and is just kind of glides through this film so effortlessly.

He was about 25 when he did it.

I was guessing he was like 24.

And when he does the dancing and the singing, the Elvis Presley stuff, he's incredible.

He can do everything. He can sing, he can dance, he can do stunts, he can do comedy, he can play all the beats that this thing is throwing at him without missing any of them.

I know Val Kilmer was an actor that I really liked. I don't want to say, I don't want to, and he is dead and he died quite tragically of throat cancer too early in life. And look, Val Kilmer, I'm just going to put this out there, he had a pretty bad reputation in Hollywood. He was not known as being one of the nicest dudes.

He lived large and indulgently.

In fact, there is a saying, which again, no one under 40 will understand, but Joel Schumacher said of Val Kilmer, he said, Will Rogers never met Val Kilmer. Will Rogers was famous for his expression was, I never met a man I didn't like. When you look at the talent on display here, the physical beauty of Val Kilmer, his smoothness, his fluidity, his singing talent, his charisma, how shitty a human being must he have been that he wasn't George Clooney?

I mean, Jesus Christ, this guy had everything.

Yes, and he got in his own way.

By all accounts, right?

This is not just me being a dick.

I mean, it's like literally by all accounts, he's like, yeah.

He was allegedly legendarily difficult and challenging.

But my God, Paul, like if he just...

What an extraordinary talent.

And just in this film, like again, in this restaurant scene, there's a whole bit that happens. Okay, so let's just... Hillary Flaman, the daughter of the kidnap scientist, has actually been running away from the East German police. She snuck into the country to find her father.

Yes.

She winds up in the restaurant hiding from the police. Nick sees her and decides to be a gentleman and rescue her.

After a rendezvous to hand off an urgent letter that needs to be sent to New York, and then the guy she hands it off to is shot. But then before he dies... Well, the letter is burned in front of him, right? He sets it on fire so it doesn't fall into enemy hands. And it turns out to be her prize entry for the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes.

Another gag no one under 40 will understand. Exactly.

And again, it's like this elaborate thing for this one little stupid gag.

But again, it's like the entire...

It's funny, but it's insane.

Oh my God.

But the next gag is even better because Nick and Hillary wind up in the middle of a waltz that's being done in this restaurant.

Because he rescues her because she's about to be rejected from admission because this is a private event.

Which will throw her in the hands of the German police.

You're not on the guest list. And he comes in to save her and acts like she is with him.

And the following conversation takes place while they do the most physically hilarious, weird, stupid waltz. Producer Brad, clip number two, please.

You're an American.

That's right.

My uncle was born in America.

Oh, really?

But he was one of the lucky ones. He managed to escape in a balloon during the Jimmy Carter presidency.

I bet he's got a lot of great stories.

Yes. He would tell me about all the large houses and expensive cars, and how the young people waste their time watching television and listening to rock and roll music.

What's wrong with television?

Not all television. Mesh was okay, and the old Mary Tyler Morsha. It just seems like the young people of America take their freedom for granted.

It just keeps happening.

What is this?

So this is a classic meeting of our-

It's supposed to be a Meet Cute.

Yes.

Of our male and female leads, and of course from different worlds who are coming together. Of course, he is inexorably finding himself tumbling into an espionage situation. Yes. Unknowing of what her situation is. But also amid this are all these gags. So as he gets up to leave the table to go save her, his glass is poured.

Oh, that's right, because his manager got him Ripple, which is like a cheap wine-o-wine.

Yeah.

So when they pour it into his glass as he leaves, the camera just stays on the glass as it melts.

Obviously, acid meant to poison it, but they overdid it and it melts the glass.

No, I don't think it's acid. The gag isn't that it's acid. The gag is that it's a cheap wine. The manager says, I got you the 1984 Ripple Blanc. It's supposed to be terrific.

Okay.

No, this is a joke about that. Remember how when we were in college, we were poor, we had to drink like Nitrain and it mentaled your guts?

That was the joke.

Okay, sure. And then there's little things like as they're chatting and about speaking English.

The waltz only gets more ridiculous and then they're dancing on like geese and flapping their arms.

And then there's a bit like, I know a little German, he's sitting over there and then you cut to a little person.

Like a little person in Lederhosen.

There's this, and then like they're talking about their names, how they got their names. It's all this meat cute stuff, but it's like unhinged.

It's unhinged, it's deconstructed, it's bizarre.

My name's Hilary, and in German it means she whose bosoms defy gravity. It just goes on and on, all this back and forth stuff, but what starts as a kind of normal, classically staged, elegant waltz, or whatever, of the two of them, and they're both expert dancers.

Well, they're going through the choreography perfectly.

They're having this conversation we just heard.

It quickly transforms into this unhinged...

Well, that's what I was saying.

They're flapping their arms like geese.

Like, just crazy moves, this choreography that makes no sense, that it's inexplicable that the two of them would know the... No.

Oh, no. Absolutely.

But it doesn't matter.

It's just like in Never Say Never Again, where Sean Connery and Kim Basinger do an entire choreographed tango for no damn reason.

But at least it's like they're doing the tango. We know what the tango is. They know what a tango is. Here it's like they're doing some like weird mating ritual from Planet 10. Like it just is crazy. It makes no sense.

Paul is foreshadowing.

Yeah, a little bit.

Now we have the now she goes back to her hotel. Please, please. We're like 10 minutes into the movie.

Well, but you missed a huge number.

What? What did I miss?

Then there is an announcement, an introduction about this person who is going to grace them. But Rivers thinks that they're talking about him, that he is going to be summoned to give a performance.

This is a funny gag.

It is very funny. And so both of them think that they're being introduced to come to the stage.

Nick gets up to the band earlier. And one of the plans was his manager gave him the arrangements for the concert the next day. So he goes up to stage and starts handing out the arrangements to the musicians.

Yes. And then Val Kilmer does an incredibly elaborate rendition of Tutti Frutti.

During which the East German chamber quartet that is playing the very state music in the restaurant turns into like a rockabilly band. They're still in their tuxedos, but now they suddenly have electric guitars and they're like doing the Chuck Berry duck walk. It's going on.

They're possessed by Western just decadence of the music. So the crowd loves it. They go wild, but the general and the dignitary, they storm out. The police are coming in. Hillary sneaks away to the hotel room. And who arrives?

Who arrives at the hotel room? But please, I love that. Omar Sharif. Now the car has been compacted all around him. So it's Omar Sharif's face sticking out of like a piece of metal in this kind of cube that used to be his Citroen.

It's like he's like tottering in like a destroyed R2-D2 or gonk droid with his head.

He looks like a gonk droid, yes.

Yeah, his head poking out of this crushed car and his feet and then tumbles onto the ground.

It's insane and he's trying to reach some piece of, he's trying to give her a piece of information that he wrote down. He's got to get it in the glove box, but of course he's inside the crushed car.

For another rendezvous and in order to rescue your father. And so she says, well, I will take your place at the rendezvous because there's no way apparently to get him out of this thing.

He's trapped inside of, he's been compacted inside of a car.

I just assume he's just left to die because it's like it's so insane.

Now, do you think this is why Omar Sharif did the movie so he could do this scene?

You know, I would have done the movie to do this scene. I think being stuck inside a compacted car is pretty cool.

Omar Sharif is in three scenes in this movie.

But by the way, he plays all of them to the...

They're all fun.

For an actor, he's like, this is a blast.

Look, here's the thing.

Omar Sharif famously like one of the most debonair, amazing men ever. You know, like in Lawrence of Arabia, he is a thing of beauty. Again, much like the Val Kilmer... He was sort of like the...

Dr. Shavago.

Come on. I mean, yeah. And, but, you know, around this time, like he was actually more famous for playing bridge professionally. And he actually had a newspaper column called Omar Sharif on Bridge. And he was probably, he was probably just playing bridge at some club in London. And they came in and said, Omar, do you want to make an easy 10 grand? You know, and he probably said... And he did the... And he's great in this movie. He just plays everything like he's in, you know... And that's actually one of the things that, you know, if you say again, Peter Lamont, Maurice Jarre, Omar Sharif, it's like, they're not playing it like they're in a parody. And I think... Maybe. Never mind. All right. And so we go to the ballet, we go to the ballet and then we have like, this tasteless... I mean, it's funny, but it's also tasteless. It goes on forever. There's... So they're at the ballet. And of course you've got the ballerinas doing the thing. And then the male ballerinas come out and they all have massive erections that you can see through their tights.

I didn't necessarily read it as massive erections necessarily, just as massive bulges.

Well, they were stiff and pushing forward enough that at one...

They are able to support the weight of a ballerina.

At one point, the gag goes long enough that the ballerinas are literally walking on top of their bulges as they stand in line and they're like leaping from bulge to bulge.

They're all inexplicably well endowed. Yes. And whether erect or not, they can bear a great deal of weight with their endowments and also these weirdly misshapen bulges.

You know what, this movie is not of this earth.

So Rivers is in an opera box watching this because he's a guest of the Cultural Festival. This is part of it and he's borrowing his neighbor's opera glasses. And across the theater in the opposite opera box, he sees Hillary.

And Robert Shaw from the BM.

Yes, kind of. And for her alleged rendezvous, but it is a ploy and she is then held at gunpoint by this guy who's actually, yeah, East German secret police.

Police, yes.

And so then somehow Rivers makes his way across the entire theater. Yeah, theater.

He goes to the box.

Very quickly. This doesn't make any sense. And then saves her from her assailant, tumbling him off the rail of the opera box into the crab below.

And killing him, causing him to be arrested.

Well, we don't know that he's dead yet.

He's not dead yet. He's sent to the hospital.

That's right. That's right. So Paul, there's a gag here that it was in the trailer for the movie. And I'm going to try to explain this gag. So, you know, like you're having a fist fight and you grab the other guy's face and their face gets all scrunched up, right? Yes. So then she takes her hand off the guy's face, but his face just naturally looks like that.

It just stays that way, remains scrunched up.

That place because of...

What a weird...

Okay, anyway.

Anyway.

So Nick goes to East German Prison.

He's clay face.

He's clay face.

By the way, that joke was also done in One Crazy Summer.

Oh, really?

Do you remember the little girls who always make you faces?

Don't do that.

If you get slapped on the back, it'll stick that way. Yes.

And then they say that.

And then they get slapped, they pull their fingers away and their face is scrunched permanently.

So Nick goes to prison. Nick is now...

So they flee down a hallway, which inexplicably, this is East Germany, has door labels in English. And so they're looking for places to hide. They open the closet labeled janitor.

Oh, that's where they go. Yeah, they go to the janitor and there's just a janitor standing there in front of the door.

Yeah, so they close that. Then they see a door labeled prop room. And they open it and it is full of...

Propellers.

Propellers.

Like big propellers, little propellers, AC-3 propeller, just a room full of propellers.

Just in case you might need them. So...

Why is that gag so funny to me?

That gag is almost as funny to me as in UHF, the Weird Al movie, where they have a supply closet and there's a fight going on and they open the supply closet and the guy jumps out and goes, supplies!

Again, it's the...

Why is that so funny to me?

It's the extravagance and overindulgence of the gag.

It's insane.

It's insane. So they duck in there, they have a little thing and he's like, he basically covers her escape out the window.

Yes. And he gets arrested.

And then he gets arrested and he's in jail and he is marking what we think are the days.

Yes, he's marking on the wall.

And he's just marked 20 as his hapless manager arrives. And it's like, yeah, he's been here 20 minutes.

You get the sense he's been there 20 days. It looks like he's singing, you know, yeah. And it's been 20 and he says, I've been here 20 minutes. Yes.

But all Martin wants to talk about is what?

Let's just, let's hear clip number three, because I think that that really explains this movie to everybody. Let's do that.

Nick, I've tried everything. The embassy, the German government, consulate. I even talked to the UN ambassador. It's no use.

I just can't bring my wife to orgasm.

Gee, this is a shame, Martin. Have you tried one of these?

Well, thanks. I'll give it a whirl.

What you're not seeing, because this is a podcast, is that he literally reaches under his cot in his prison cell and pulls out a very large box. Very large. The Anal Intruder. And while the scene goes on, the manager is looking through the box and it is like a giant, like, jackhammer power drill with a bunch of attachments, including a large rubber fist, a banana. It's nuts. And Paul, I don't know if this joke is funny. I actually don't find it very funny, but I mean, it's weird. It's weird. And anyway, I don't think I can't even.

It is a big swing. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Here's the thing.

It's a big swing.

I, my understanding, I'm not a comedian.

I'm just I'm just an old country podcaster.

I'm not a comedy writer. I haven't worked in comedy writing rooms, but my understanding for people I know who have and who do that, is that like, yeah, you go in there, you just are like, and maybe you're consuming things, and you're having fun, and you're trying jokes out, you're throwing things around, and then there are things that are hilarious to you and in the room.

Yeah.

And some of them work, and some of them were only funny to you in the room.

Yep.

And I think this is an example of something that they just thought was genius.

Yeah, had to be.

But you gotta admit, the callback.

What the hell were they thinking?

But you do have to admit that the callback to this gag is funny. But anyway, what you find out here is that basically Nick is fucked.

Well, there's a great transition, a set up and payoff, like handoff from this scene to the next.

Well, is this not, can we talk about the scene where he's stuck in his cell, though? Has that happened yet, the one where he goes through the window, he goes through the, he tries to escape? That's later.

Okay, okay, we'll get to that. So we end this scene with a great set up for the next one, which is like, cause you know, it's like, what is he going to do about getting out, whatever? And he's like, and he's like, oh, you're here, you're a VIP, you're like a guest of honor. Um, there's nothing to worry about. Cut to, they're walking him out of his cell with a priest giving him last rites.

Oh my God, this whole gag.

In nonsense Latin, of like every Latin phrase you've ever heard or read off currency or-

Yeah, he's like, e pluribus unum, glorium sixeclurum, mirabilia dictu.

It's all nonsense. Walking him to the electric chair to be executed.

Yes, this scene goes on and on. Like it literally, like, like he's like, they're walking him to the electric chair. And then in shadow, you see them strap, strap him to the electric chair and throw the switch.

Yes.

And the reveal of the gag is Paul?

They fried the priest as a warning. Warning. Of what they're going to do to him if he doesn't cooperate.

Now Paul, now you watch this, it's not funny, but again, I'm talking to you about it. It's kind of hilarious.

It's insane.

This movie is insane.

And they take two minutes of screen time to do this one gag.

Again, it's just the elaborate overindulgence. Like nothing can be a small gag. It's got to be big. So then they're interrogating you because they want to know why did you attack the police sergeant at the ballet?

They introduce him to his torturers.

And he's like, I don't know. Like whatever. And they're like, well, if anything happens to him, he's in the hospital. That's right. The East German police guy, if anything dies to him, you're fucked. And they get a phone call from the hospital. And I love this. Immediately. The general is like, uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay. Let me know if there's any change in his condition. He hangs up and says, he's dead. That's the best joke in the movie. I love it.

You know, Paul, um, yeah, you know, it's funny how sometimes it's just something like, yeah.

In the moment we're recording this, uh, somewhat timely relative to a current political leader who has not been seen.

That's true. Now, yes. Now, now here, this is really interesting. So they, so they, so he's introduced to his torturers. One of them is played by Carol Stryken, who was Lurch in The Addams Family movies.

And Mr. Holm in The Next Generation.

That's right. And then, uh, and, and he's getting tortured by these guys.

One of them is, um, I know their names.

What are their names? Can you, can you, can you, can you, you know this? I don't remember this gag, but it was funny. Go ahead.

Let me introduce you to Bruno. I wish we had this clip because there's also descriptions of each of them. That's deranged and, and ominous, uh, Bruno and Klaus. Bruno is like this, has his dark sunglasses and, and looks like a member of Croft Verac, yeah. B, DSM kind of torture specialist. And then there is Klaus, who apparently is just a crazy moron. Yes. Uh, and unhinged and has crazy hair.

So then they cut, so then they cut to, they're about to torture him and they cut to Mick running down a high school hallway.

Like they kind of do a blur.

There's an important reveal though, because they reveal that they've gone after his manager too.

Oh yes. Yeah. The manager can't help him because the manager can't do anything because he was found in his hotel room impaled on, how did, what did they refer to it?

A large electrical device. Because they had not considered that in East Germany, they use a different current for voltage in the outlets. And so it basically exploded.

And another great, another great line gag in this movie, which is where the German guy says, we did everything we could, but it took our doctors four hours to remove the smile from his face.

He died doing what he loved.

You know, what he loved best. Okay. Anyway, so now we, so, so Mick is being tortured.

He's being tortured by Bruno and Klaus.

They're like, but suddenly there's like a fuzzy Wayne's World transition to a dream sequence.

He like loses consciousness maybe slightly.

And he's running and it's like risky business. He's running down the school hallway.

He has a, I didn't study for the test nightmare.

And there's literally a guy standing in the hallway going, Nick, the test already happened. You missed the finals. You missed the finals. You missed the finals. And then they blur back to the torture room.

And now he's being witch. Where he's being tortured.

Yeah. But now he's okay.

Cause he's like, oh, thank God.

It was all a dream.

The nightmare was worse than the torture.

What a weird thing.

Okay. Yeah. All right. Anyway.

He's then returned to his cell.

No, no, no, no. Then comes another great lie before the...

Now, Paul, I'm going to stop you.

Oh, please.

Now it's me stopping you. This is amazing.

There's a little bit of a minor plot point that's only going to add another hour to the...

There's a report of the torture to the general.

The general, they're talking about the torture. And the subaltern turns to the general and says, should I bring out the Leroy Neiman paintings? And the general says, no, we would not want to be accused of violating the Geneva Convention.

Yes, how could I? Yes.

This does call back to our very first episode, Paul, because you may remember at the end of Rocky III, when Rocky and Apollo start their fight, I remember Leroy Neiman was painting live at RockyCon.

Wow.

And the movie ends with a fade into the Leroy Neiman painting of them fighting.

Wow. I thank you for illuminating that startling connection.

Now, you know what, Paul, here's the thing. Look, if this were a video podcast, the audience would be seeing you be sort of smug, holier-than-thou look on your face as you demean my gag, but I gotta tell you something, my friend.

What I was going to say is you have...

But you are the one who loves foreshadowing, so don't look at me in that tone of voice, Paul Alvarado-Dykstra.

I was just going to give you the compliment that you have elevated this podcast to advanced cinema studies. This is now a graduate level course now in art history and media theory.

So Paul, there follows one of my favorite gags in this movie, but it's not the best gag ever. So now Nick is back in his... Now Paul, why does Nick sell on the wall for no damn reason, there's what appears to be a picture of Cher? Did you notice that? Yes, there's like a tack top on the wall for no... Anyway, Nick does the thing where he goes into the air shaft, into the ventilation shaft.

For a prison that is meant to hold people prisoner...

Say the word, Paul, you want to say inexplicable again.

There's an inexplicable number of vents and orifices and panels and hatches in every wall.

But the funny thing is, he goes through... Each time he goes in through one vent, he comes out another back into the cell, and it goes on for three minutes. He goes in one vent and then he tumbles out the other one, then he goes into the next vent, then he tumbles out and it goes on and on.

At one point, he emerges from the toilet.

Yes, you see Val Kilmer's skibbity toilet.

Yeah, it just, again, it's just, it's, it's, it's loony tunes.

It's Bugs Bunny. It's loony tunes.

It's Bugs Bunny, yeah. It is totally Bugs Bunny.

But finally, after a lot of trial and error, Oh my God, finally. of every combination and permutation of trying to go in and out of these various places, where does he emerge?

He winds up in a lab where none other than the great Michael Goff, who we Americans know as Alfred from the, starting with the Tim Burton to the Joel Schumacher Batman movies.

Yes, he will be reunited with in 1989.

Again, it's what I love about movies made in England, is that you get these actors and you're like, Oh, that's the guy who played Red Eleven and died. And then you're like, he's also one of the greatest Shakespearean actors who ever lived. Like Michael Goff was like one of Derek Jarman's associates and like was in his, I mean, he's very like, avant-garde sort of British actor, but here he is, you know, doing what British actors do, which is act no matter what.

He's filming it in a silly, stupid American comedy.

And he gives the following monologue. Producer Brad, clip number four, please.

I am Dr. Paul Flaman. I am a prisoner here just like you, my son. You see, a year ago, I was close to perfecting the first magnetic desalinization process. It was so revolutionary. It was capable of removing the salt from over 500 million gallons of seawater a day. Do you realize what that could mean to the starving nations of the Earth?

Wow. They'd have enough salt to last forever.

But then one night, a secret police broke into my house, they tore me from my family, ransacked my laboratory and brought me to this dungeon.

That sucks.

I love that Lily Flaman just starts in that monologue. There's no hello, I am what. He just literally, Nick comes in and he just starts monologuing, giving his backstory because fuck it, that's what you do in a movie. And the lab is also like humongous and it's full of equipment.

And it's like for Frankenstein lab, like it's a silly B-movie or like.

But Paul, can I describe my favorite? I mean, Paul, I didn't know that this was my favorite gag. I didn't remember this gag.

Before we get that, just to build a little suspense for those who do not know what's coming. How magnificent is he? I would just listen to him all day saying anything. At the same time, he is playing Dr. Paul Flemond, the father of Hilary, who's a member of the French Underground Resistance. He could not be more in East Germany in 1984. He could not be less French if he tried or more English, and makes no attempt to put on a French accent. Nope.

I love him.

I love him.

Who cares?

It makes no sense, but he's... Because, again, he plays it so straight with such earnestness and conviction, he's hilarious. Such...

I mean, I love this. He's got so much gravitas, and he literally... and he sells every... Now, he explains that he was working on his desalinization project, which, as Nick...

But he's basically built a nuclear mine, a magnetic mine.

That is magnetic.

Yeah. Yeah. That literally attracts submarines to it.

So... Because all of... Yeah.

is attracted to submarines.

Yes.

Now, all of NATO is going to have all of their subs go through the streets of Gibraltar, so he's been forced to build these mines that are going to destroy NATO. Yes. Now, here's the greatest side gag ever.

Oh, my God.

Nick is poking around the mine. Now, the mine has a giant U-shaped magnet, like, from Looney Tunes, on top of it. Yes. That's just what it has, right?

Just to visually convey.

To make sure you know it's a magnet. Nick is looking at the bomb. He accidentally switches it on. Paul Das Boat, a World War II submarine, crashes through the wall because it's been attracted to the mine.

This gag, I mean, it's so, just me describing it, it doesn't, I, it's not, I can't, it's like literally crash in the submarine, just like it can't.

Again, it's another example of something that is so Insane. Profoundly stupid.

But also, just-

But you know what's funny? It's funny because it makes sense.

It's exhilaratingly funny.

The mine attracts submarines.

And it's a genius. It's just, but it's all at once. It just is- It's crazy.

Yeah.

It's crazy. And then this, the racket of this elaborate explosion, implosion of the wall, probably multiple walls that it's come through, then summons the guards, whatever, who then get the drop on them as he was preparing to go to help him escape, and they are captured.

Paul, now Michael Goff says a line here that is just- I had to rewind it five times because I didn't know what he said. And then I finally- He says, something will be as good as a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory. What the fuck does that even mean? It will be as good as a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory.

What?

Anyway, they are captured again.

But there is a dilemma.

Our villains have a dilemma. He must be allowed to perform tonight at the Cultural Festival, but he is already about to be executed by a firing squad. That's right. So, what does our general have to do? He has to go make a call.

He has to make the call to stop the firing squad from killing Nick.

I believe a gag upon it... We don't do the giant phone gag yet. We do the phone gag where we cut to the exterior firing squad. He's set up, lined up against the wall.

They're tying his blindfold or whatever the hell it is.

And then in the foreground on a little cocktail table or pedestal, there is an old rotary phone that rings.

Yes, that's ringing.

In general, and then as the firing squad is loading, is getting ready to fire, and then a little old lady with a walker starts slowly lurching across the grass towards the ringing phone that is desperately trying to stop the execution so that he can perform.

And we cut away from it before the old lady reaches the phone.

We don't know if Mike dies or not.

To the concert and now Paul, the concert has one about the concert as a gag. That's so now, as we all know, in these old timey rockabilly concerts, right? There's always a ballad that is so emotional that like the, the singer just gets very over. It's kind of like when James Brown would pretend to get injured, you know, and he would like take a knee. And then the guy would come out and put his cape on and James Brown would kind of hobble off the stage. And then he threw off the cape and yes. So there's a whole point in this. Yeah. He's singing, he's singing this ballad and he's all over Rod. And then at one point he like, basically he's trying to commit suicide on stage. He takes out a noose and he starts putting it on his neck and then the band comes up and takes the noose away from him. And you think, oh, that's funny. It's kind of like the song is so whatever.

It's dark. It's funny, but it's very dark.

But then while he's singing that, then he walks to another part of the stage where there's an oven, a gas-powered oven. He turns on the gas and while he's singing, he sticks his head in the oven and the band comes in and pulls him out of the oven. He's singing the band is playing.

Yeah, he's singing like, I can't live without you.

I can't live without you.

And his voice has reverb in the oven.

Yes, and then suddenly there's a set of railroad tracks that he walks to and he lies down on top of the rail. The band has, while the performance is going on, anyway, it's just one of these gags that just keeps getting more and more abstract. It's hilarious. And then what happens?

Well, there are two things here.

Do go on, I don't even know what's happening.

And we can cut this, but there are two things worth noting.

One is, we have this elaborate concert sequence where he plays a band and it's like he's having his Beatles moment because all these German women and girls are losing their minds.

And the thing is, some of them are holding signs and the signs say, the signs are supposed to say, you know, Nick, but it's spelled N-E-K.

Nick. Yeah. Yeah.

Typographical humor is the best.

He, at one point, he reaches into his pants. He somehow pulls out his boxers. Yeah.

Like, like just pulls them out of his own pants.

Out of his own pants. Again, defying the laws of physics, tosses them out to an ecstatic crowd. He performs not one, but two songs. The movie just kind of stops dead.

More than once. The movie stops. Like, like, and there's at least three more musical numbers in the movie.

There's so many musical numbers. And he's really good. But it also just is like he's doing these weird throwback songs. And this is not Back to the Future, because that's next year.

So he starts as the Beach Boys, then he becomes Chuck, no, then he becomes Little Richard. And now he's kind of like Frankie Avalon. He's kind of like a like, like, like Teen Heartthrob.

And he pulls an underage girl up on the stage with him to serenade her. And the song is, this is not Age Well at all. And it is basically about him looking forward to her being old enough. And it's kind of horrifying. It is like, wow, was this ever a good idea or appropriate? And she's crying because she's so excited and in love with them. But like the visual dichotomy of like, it's just so gross.

But it's just so bizarre because suddenly the movie is Bye Bye Birdie. Like, I mean, this is a parody of Casablanca.

Yeah.

You know, Guns of Navarone, you know, Ice Station Zebra, every World War II, you know, the Battle of Algiers and Bye Bye Birdie.

Yeah. It's weird. It's really weird. But you would go out of your way to do this. And again, it's kind of, yeah, I just...

Now, how does he get out of the performance without being killed?

I don't remember what happens now.

Oh, after his second song...

His second song, I think. This movie is barely an hour and a half long, by the way. And it has like five major musical numbers in it.

Before the third song really can get underway, because at this point, the East German power structure has lost their patience. And so they're sending in the soldiers or whatever to return him to his prison or maybe back to the firing squad, because he's done his performance. That's enough. A guitar magically descends from the heavens. On two cables. And from the rafters is Hillary, who has rigged this rescue mechanism for him to grab on the guitar. And that has lifted out of frame up into the rafters. That's right. And we cut to the exterior. And they escape on not motorcycles, but bicycles.

Wow. I must have just literally this. You know, Paul, sometimes in these movies, I don't know if this happens to you, but do you ever sort of blackout in the middle of these movies? Like you're watching some 80s movie. I mean, and it's like this where you just kind of go like, I don't even know what's happening anymore. Like this happened to me during during Deathstalker.

I just kind of went like, this happens to me in my day to day goings on. So, yeah, somehow I maintained coherence through most of this film.

Paul, though, if I may now, I want to, I want to, I want to, I don't know if this is, next, we have the scene in the park with the pooping and the bird and the joke on the joke, because they're, because they're, they're, now, Hillary has a contact in the French Resistance, a Swedish bookseller, who is going to, what is that? What are we doing?

A quick thing.

Are you stopping me?

Quick thing, because it's a little bit of, I mean.

For those of you not watching at home, Paul is making weird Palpatine hand gestures at me, and I don't know what he's trying to communicate to me.

I was not trying to put the whammy on you.

I hope not. There's a little cutaway.

You're gonna call the force lightning on me? What's happening?

You know I love my foreshadowing. We get a little bit of foreshadowing because there is a carrier pigeon slash dove.

Oh my God, the carrier pigeon, yes.

That arrives with a little briefcase.

It's got a little briefcase, yeah.

She's a general and a flight helmet, and is like, oh, this is interesting. East German technology at its best. There's just a little nugget there of conveying information about what's going on and that they've escaped or whatever. Then yes, we have the scene of Rivers and Hillary in the park at night, the giant pigeon statue in the background, and Hillary reveals finally to Rivers that she is searching for her dad, and she shows him a picture and Nick recognizes.

Oh my God, that's Dr. Fulmon.

I just met him. I was in the prison with him. I know where he is. So done and done. Finally, their storylines converge, and now they are going to work together. And she's like, well, we have to go to this rendezvous to pay this.

Now, Paul, this is the moment when I'm going to channel Paul Alvarado-Dykstra. Ready?

Oh, my God.

At this point, this movie serves us with a feast, a banquet. Paul, we are now regaled. We are given a gift now by this film. And I just want to talk about that because The Majesty, if you're shooting a movie in London and Pinewood in 1984, it's one of the last chances you're going to get to work with the great, great Peter Cushing.

Yes.

And I think this is one of the last films I ever saw him in. And this is a banquet, my friend. He's supposed to be Swedish. Yes. And what you learn quickly is that they're not speaking Swedish, is that this entire three minute scene was filmed backwards. Yes. And it starts getting in a one-er. In a one-er. And the entire scene starts very like, well, no, it actually starts with a huge side gag.

First with one of the greatest side gags.

Because he's looking at, it's a used bookstore. It's a rare bookstore. So he's looking at a book through a magnifying glass.

His eye is huge, right?

One of those things where the eye is huge because he's in a magnifying. Then he lowers the magnifying glass and it turns out his eye is just that big. Yeah. He literally just has one eye that's five times larger than the other.

This crazy prosthetic, yeah.

And as they speak, he puts on his glasses which have one lens that's five times larger than the other. They're talking this weird gibberish language that's supposed to be Swedish. But then you realize that like, because it's a bookstore, he starts handing books to Nick.

They're doing a walk and talk.

Oh my God.

Backwards, filmed backwards in a oner.

In a oner. And Peter Fishing must be like in his late 70s, early 80s when he's doing this. He's ancient. So it's like for him, it's a feat of athleticism.

And they are making it as complicated as they can. In terms of like putting books back on the shelf.

He keeps sending the books to Nick and he keeps tossing them up to the shelf.

Yes, which then obviously were then tossed to him when they filmed it and he had to catch. And just on and on, the choreography, the execution, I should have looked this up. Maybe producer Brad did us the favor of how long this took, how many takes this took. But this is such an achievement. And I cannot even begin to think what their freaking AD was thinking when they were like, here's what we're gonna do. It's like, are you insane?

Just to reset the books on the shelves to toss them back so that Val Kilmer could catch them as they fall from the shelves. I mean, it's-

Yeah, like everything has to go perfectly. And it's worth it. It is the master stroke of the film.

Honestly, like, look, this movie takes a lot of big swings. The majority of them don't land. It's a movie that is sort of a curio, I would say, at this point. It's sort of the thing they did after Airplane! Where they could do anything they wanted and they made this and it's really weird. And you see the lack of an editor or a censor, but just for this one scene, it's hysterical.

And then the payoff, which also is an unintentional, a little bit of an echo to a Ghostbusters moment. They are told or saying that they need a place to hide out because they're being hunted.

Oh my God, yes.

And they need a place to hide away until tomorrow when they can go meet up with the French Underground Resistance.

Cushing says, well, there's a loft upstairs. You can, in the second, there's a second floor loft. You can spend the night there and then go see the French Resistance. Why don't you go up using this firefighter's pole?

Take the pole. And they reveal at the end of this walk and talk, there's, this was maybe a firehouse or something, but there's a fire, a big tall fire pole, and they both get on it and they-

And they just fly right up.

They fly it up because this is how they started the scene when they shot it.

I realize this, the scene started with you and-

With them sliding down the fire pole.

And sliding down and doing the entire scene backwards with Peter Cushing's 17, oh my God.

It's incredible.

It's incredible. Look, I love Peter Cushing. Van Helsing from the old Christopher Lee Hammer Dracula movies. Grand Moff Tarkin, obviously. Paul, you know, I learned the most amazing thing about Peter Cushing recently. Please share. And I just wanna, this is a little documentary on YouTube you can get, and it's about Peter Cushing's hobby. And his hobby was painting lead soldiers. And he literally, and Paul, you go into his room, and he's got, and he literally was a nerd. He was a D&D lead figure painting nerd before they had those. And he's literally in his little cardigan with his ascot and his monocle, and he's painting the little, and he's talking about how the Napoleon, my God, Peter Cushing was a nerd. It's the best thing ever. Please do yourself a favor and look this up.

I have to find this, and I wanna put this in the show notes. I thought you were going to say, and I was just gonna guess that his hobby was carrier pigeons, but this is even better.

No, apparently, and it's some bizarro story, like King George showed him how to fight, how to re-stage. It was some royal, some member of the... Amazing. And Cushing met Lord Mountbatten, who told him how to play games with lead soldiers, and since then, it has been his passion in life. It's insane. So anyway.

Oh, oh, oh, wait, wait.

Let's, let's hear it.

From an ever-growing family of dogs to an ever-growing army of toy soldiers at the Kensington home of film actor Peter Cushing. For in his spare time, Peter, an enthusiastic member of the Model Soldier Society, collects, makes and acts as general to an army over 5,000 strong. These troops, from every period of military history, are the result of meticulous research into uniforms and military techniques.

Anyway, I just wanted to turn it to Paul and talk about what a feast, what a banquet, what a bacchanal of joy and sheer unadulterated bliss and pleasure we have been injected with, perhaps, to our hyperthalamic cortex. Yeah.

Yeah.

Where hopefully it will linger.

Forever. Paul, what happens next? I don't even know.

Next we meet the friend.

We have another mystical number, right?

And we get so much more than we ever thought we would in the lot.

Well, first you get the scene we started with.

Well, first she's reading erotica to him.

Oh my God.

And then relates a formative childhood memory. And then we get a whole other movie in flashback.

Oh my God, she explains to him.

And it's The Blue Lagoon, which no one listening will know what that is.

No one under 40 is going to know what the fuck we're talking. Okay, so now guys, when Paul and I were kids, you know, we didn't have the kind of access to pornography that kids today have, right? And there was a whole market in Hollywood of making movies that were not porn, but you know, movies that could maybe wind up on cable TV and help children our age to maybe see some things. One of these movies was called The Blue Lagoon. It was Brooke Shields and a guy named Christopher Atkins playing kids who are shipwrecked on an island. And of course, even though they're 10 when they get shipwrecked, they managed to survive up until their puberty, at which point they start having sex like bunnies. And then eventually they're rescued. That's the whole fucking movie. But that was a movie that, you know, formatively many of us watched on the movie channel and learned a thing or two about nothing.

Don't forget the ripoff Paradise with Phoebe Cates and Willie Ames.

Oh my God. Wow. That is true. Like The Blue Lagoon was big enough that it had a low budget ripoff. It had a mock buster.

Yes.

So it's a parody of The Blue Lagoon where apparently Hillary and...

It's an extended parody. It's like a whole short film within the movie.

And when they're stranded on the island...

Shot on location in an island with other actors in like recreating The Blue Lagoon, it was sequence after sequence.

And they build a house out of palm fronds that has like a garage door, with a garage, like a clicker, like an automatic garage door.

It's insane.

It's insane. So that happens. That goes on and on and on forever.

And then in an attempt to relate to this, again, elaborate film within a film about how she was shipwrecked and how she spent all of her formative years in India, in an island with a boy. Rivers relates that once, that yeah, same thing happened to him basically. He once got lost in a department store as a kid and lost his mom.

Now here's the thing. You think the joke is going to be, he tells this story that goes on for 10 minutes about being shipwrecked and all this stuff, right? So that happens. And then he starts telling us, and you think the joke is, oh yeah, I can empathize, I got lost in a Macy's one, right? That's funny. But then he keeps talking. And then it turns out he was lost in the Macy's for his entire teenage years.

His mom was never found. And so then he was adopted by the staff of Macy's, ended up living in the Macy's store. Growing up, and then this became how he became a musician, a singer-songwriter, because they needed a jingle.

Because one day the marketing people needed a jingle, so he went up to the music part of the store and picked up his old guitar.

And then he now serenades her with his cover rendition of Elvis' Are You Lonesome Tonight, which he has rewritten into a Macy's jingle.

This is insane. This is literally taking a gag to such a like, like literally you think the gag is, hey, this huge long elaborate thing happened to me. Oh, here's the thing that takes that takes the piss out of it. Haha, no. Yeah. Then it just keeps happening. And then it morphs into two more gags after that. Here's what I want to know.

Here's what I want to know. Did they pitch and or attempt to also film a flashback of a small child lost in Macy's and then adopted by them and growing up in the budget? And then a montage of a child growing into teenhood and young adulthood in a Macy's. I'm guessing not, because it's like we have, Val Kilmer is a star, we want to stay on him. We have not mentioned the actress who plays Hillary. Lucy Gutteridge is her name? Lucy Gutteridge, I believe.

Now, I don't know her from anything else. What else does she have?

I don't know her from a goddamn thing. And she is fine in the film, but is not at the level of incandescence that Kilmer is.

But then again, who is?

There's a weird thing about Lucy Gutteridge, and I don't know if she's acting or if she's just-

Her last credit was 1993.

Okay. All right, so she probably, you know, anyway. But it's weird because she's sort of, she acts like there's a scene like where she's in the balcony with the East German guy, and there's a scene where she's trying to like get him to, she's trying to faint. She's trying to get him to look away so she can grab his gun. And she does it, but she's so clumsy. And then later she's firing a gun, but you can tell like, it's almost like they didn't even show her how to use a gun just so that she would be extra clumsy and weird in the movie. She doesn't look like she knows how to handle props, and it's odd, you know?

I, yeah, I'm not quite sure I understand what they were going for with that character in the casting.

With her performance?

Yeah, because I, because also I think because they're spoofing different things at different times. And anyway, but so I should say this then leads to them getting it on. And now we then cut to a pastoral scene, the French countryside.

Oh my God, Paul, Paul, I love, I love this gag because the Peter Cushing tells them they're at a potato, they're at the potato farm.

So they have to go to a potato farm. How are they going to get there from Paris? No, not Paris, from East Berlin to a potato farm.

I don't know.

It's not the French countryside. It's the East German countryside. What am I saying? That I've got French resistance in my head.

But all I know is they knock on the door, Paul.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is their mode of transportation that's revealed? There is a farmer on a big wagon with bales, loads of hay, and we hear opera singing as he is with his horse, as he's like going with his horse-drawn carriage. We then get in closer. It's the horse that is singing opera.

Yes.

And then the horse stops to then reveal from under the hay hidden have been transported Rivers and Hillary to the German countryside, to the pig farm and the potato farm, whatever.

They knock on the door. And there's a joke because there's like a little peephole at the very top of the door. The door is like eight feet tall. But then when the guy opens the door, he's actually like a little person. That's funny. But then Nick Rivers says, is this the potato farm? And the guy goes, why, yes, I am Mr. Potato.

Why is that so fucking funny to me?

Because it's so stupid.

So stupid.

But it gets stupider because we find the secret headquarters of the French Resistance that has been transposed, transported from World War II to 1984 East Germany, or they've just been procreating there in hiding.

Now, Paul, but this is where we also, but the person who's going to introduce us to the men, this is where we get the big reveal that the leader of the French Resistance just happens to be the same person.

Nigel.

Who was Hillary's boy.

Desert Island Paramore. Who they were separated when she was rescued and she never knew what happened to him.

Yeah, he was rescued by a boat and the sailor, and then they make another homophobic joke about how the sailors took advantage of him in every way possible. And she hugs him and says, that sounds terrible. And then you see in his eyes like, it wasn't that terrible, whatever. It's more homophobia. So now we get this shattering reveal that the head of the French Resistance is Nigel, yeah.

Yes.

But then Nigel, yeah.

And we see, because they are all held at gunpoint.

That's right.

By the fully assembled.

Fully assembled French Resistance.

And what a colorful crew they are.

I don't think we can do it justice. I think we need to let the movie speak for itself here. Producer Brad, may we please have Clip No.

Let's meet them.

Du Quoi. Introduce the American to the men. Very well. This is Chevalier, Montage, Détente, Avant-Garde, and Déjà-vu.

Have we not met before, Monsieur?

Soufflé. Here's to cargo, and chocolate mousse.

And of course, that's the black man, because you gotta have that joke, right? Yeah, whatever. Wow, Paul, Deja Vu, played by Jim Carter, also known as Mr. Carson from Downton Abbey.

Yes.

I adore that man. I think he's phenomenal.

Yes, a nice man.

So again, just getting a lot of fun actors here. So now, Paul, we're in the end game of the movie.

Also, we're at a point where it's like we've been making so much fun of the Germans, we don't want to leave out an opportunity to make merciless fun of the French.

But really, we're making merciless fun of Americans, because it's really about how Americans just don't understand the world. It's really what this movie is about. I mean, if you really look at what this movie is about, it's about how poorly America understands the rest of the universe as expressed by our popular culture. If this movie has any function once its period of cultural currency has passed, which is happening quite rapidly, I might add, because half the gags don't even make any sense if you're under 40.

It has not happened already, yes.

Yeah. But I think it really is a document of these filmmakers making fun of Americans and how we viewed the world by the time of the Cold War.

Sure.

That's what the movie says to me. Now, Paul, we got to-

Here's the thing. Then we get Nigel revealing his backstory, and now Hillary has a dilemma.

She does.

Because she had long since given up any hope of ever seeing him again, who she had held in her heart as the love of her life, and she has just recently fallen for Nick Rivers.

Yeah.

What the Casablanca is going on here.

What is going to happen? Then there's like this-

You didn't mention that Nigel appears as an adult in the same attire as on the island.

Yes. Oh my God.

Nigel's wearing the same loin cloth and the necklace with the animal bones on it.

Yeah.

I blocked that out. He is scantily glad. Again, it makes no sense, like most of this movie. But then before we can really process too much, we hear one of the first of a few, Latrine.

Latrine.

Because one of the French nurses is in Latrine.

One of their scouts or whatever guys tumbles in, and he's bloodied and wounded, and is warning them that the enemy is converging, and then immediately they're under attack.

There's a traitor in their midst.

And there's a traitor in their midst who has given away their position, and they're under attack, and we have this big action sequence.

The best thing in this is that it's a shootout, and it's sort of the traditional barn shootout, right? And there's always a window with glass in it. So the entirety of the shootout consists of variations of-

Every gag they can come up with.

Every gag possible of the, I push my gun through the glass, through the square of glass to shoot outside, but then I punch the next one out, and then I punch the next one out, and then at one point Nick is playing tic-tac-toe, he's like literally shooting Xs in the windows, and then the Germans are shooting Os, and then he winds up, it's insane, it goes on forever, and it's every variation you can think of of the joke of I break a pane of glass to shoot out.

Yes, and one of the resistance fighters for the life of him cannot break the glass in the window, and then keeps trying, bringing larger and larger tools to try to do that. It's just a bunch of stupid, silly shit.

And then comes a very funny gag though, where like a grenade fall, where like everybody's standing around the room.

Yes.

A grenade comes in through one of the windows, somebody shouts, grenade, a guy jumps on top of the grenade, and instead of the guy blowing up, the grenade explodes and everybody else flies out the window.

Yes. Yes, the explosion travels under the floorboards, and then up underneath everyone else in the room, and throws them out. Somehow they escape.

We wind up escaping, and we wind up at a pizza place, weirdly.

Not just any place, pizza place. They arrive at their pizza house.

Okay. Their pizza house. Now again, you know, I said that my favorite gag on Funny Foreground, Funny Background, this is my favorite version of the gag in this movie where our characters are talking about, I didn't know that he was still alive. All this stuff is going on.

Yes.

In the background, there's a table full of kids and a very large pizza served to them, and the cheese is very stringy, and they keep stringing the cheese out. And it's like, literally, by the end of the gag, there's about 20 people and they're all tied up with cheese, and it's like a spider web of cheese, and they can't get the cheese to break.

It's hilarious. It's crazy. And it's also like this pizza place, everyone attending is like sock hop coated.

Yeah, they're all dressed like it's Happy Days, like it's the 1950s, right?

Yeah, it's very weird. But Rivers now has an existential dilemma, because Hillary's ex is back, and he's like, how can I compete with that? And so he's basically like done, and he's going to go back. He's not part of the Resistance, the Underground Movement, she's with them now, and they're back with, you know, reunited with Nigel. But they realize Rivers is the only one who's been inside the prison, and they need to break out Dr. Flemont. So they're going to need him. And so Hillary then pleads with him. And there is a little guy, I didn't ask for the clip, but it cracks me up. He's told, it seems you have become, how do we say, indispensable? To which Rivers replies, Nick replies, indispensable.

Indispensable.

Yeah. Now, he sort of said indispensable or something. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But we get another latrine. So, latrine person with a captured carrier pigeon. Again, paying off, paying it off. And it turns out, now they know definitively there is a traitor. And they all start turning and suspect maybe Nick Rivers is not.

Because he showed up and said, hey, I know where the prison is. I know where the doctor is.

I'm leading into the prison.

And how convenient is this?

And at that exact moment, Paul, a young one of these Bobby Soxers comes up and says, aren't you Nick Rivers? And he doesn't want to be seen. He doesn't want to be identified. So he says to her, no, I'm Mel Torme. And the girl leaves in a huff. And then the French Resistance gets the idea that what if he really is Mel Torme? What if he's not Nick Rivers? What if he's Mel Torme and famed communist agitator Mel Torme? So in order to prove them wrong.

By the way, Javi, do we need to pause and illuminate for the potential members of our audience who may have no idea who Mel Torme is?

Mel Torme was a famous crooner. He was one of those singers in the 50s and 60s. He was called the Velvet Fog. His voice was so supple.

Yes. And let's just say that his repertoire contrasted starkly with what we have beheld from Nick Rivers.

Yes.

He's not exactly Johnny Rodden.

More American songbook kind of, yeah, crooning and yeah, that kind of stuff.

So in order to prove that he's not Mel Torme, Nick goes to the jukebox.

And hence, by extension, not a traitor, but actually not a traitor.

Yes.

Yes.

He goes to the jukebox and he winds up doing this another musical number that is like a 50s diner. It looks like something out of the movie Grease. And by the end of this number, we know that he has conclusively proved he's not Mel Tormé because one of the members of the French Resistance says, with number seven, This is not Mel Tormé. So now we've established that. Again, five minutes of screen time for one gag is kind of hilarious.

I mean, it's an elaborately choreographed, very athletic, gymnastic choreography that Kilmer executes. Some very dangerous choreography with like sliding rugs and things.

Yeah. And then at one point, he's climbing up the walls. I mean, it goes on and on and on.

And again, it's a lot, but it's also like what movie we're watching. Like why? Because, yeah, it's so strange. So the Resistance, we cut to the Resistance fighters now, including Nick, all parachuting out of a U-Haul plane.

A DC 3 with a U-Haul sign on it.

And on the way down, literally side by side, they're parachuting down through the sky for a really long time. Hillary and Rivers have a heart-to-heart.

Yes.

About their mutual dilemmas.

Yeah.

And it concludes with Hillary admitting or exclaiming.

If only I didn't love you so much.

Exactly.

And they kiss.

And so it's like, okay, they're gonna be together.

Earlier in this film, when they got it on in the loft, right? They fall into each other's arms. They fall to the ground and the camera, of course, pans over to a fireplace, right?

And then another.

Then they roll over to the fireplace, so the camera pans over to a second fireplace, right? So in this, they fall into each other's arms, and then a fireplace comes down in a parachute behind them. Again, this movie gets so surreal. Then we have the action centerpiece of the film. And we have a great scene where, you know, it's a scene where somebody's scratching out the plan on, like, dirt with, like, leaves or whatever. But in this case, we have, like, weirdly like a...

It's a whole miniature train set.

Manifests a, like, ILM level miniature with a train set and all that. He lays out the plan. The plan involves everybody getting dressed as cows.

Not everyone.

So we're gonna sneak in dressed up as a herd of cows, right? Or it's...

Some of them are gonna dress up as a cow and sneak in with the herd. Not all of them.

Yeah. So then you've got Nigel and another guy inside of a...

Because they need first for some of them in the cow getup to turn off the electric fence, they have to find what we'll see labeled as dust fence and switching. And so they spot... And at one point, there's like, I've spotted the herd. They're the key to the whole plan. They have this elaborate cow costume. Yes.

But the cow has boots. But the cow costumes have boots on them.

The cow has boots. And when we actually see them in action, they use a real cow for these sequences, at least for the exterior of the cow.

But then they cut inside the cow or they're kind of like Tony Stark in his Iron Man suit.

And also Nigel makes a point of demanding that he will be the rear of the cow, not the head of the cow. This is important.

But also the cow, the real cow is wearing boots.

No, they put boots on a real cow?

It's hilarious.

And Javi, I want to put a pin in this for the multis. This is an incredible bovine performance.

Producer Brad, please make note.

This cow is a prodigy. If you pay close attention to how much is demanded of this cow on camera and the specific beats and blocking that the cow has to execute on camera.

Yes.

It is dazzling. It is phenomenal.

This cow is the Lee Strasberg of the Grange.

I don't know where they found this cow.

I don't know how they trained this cow. But it's one of the most impressive things in the film to me.

You know, I can't argue with that. Also, the cow that plays the bull that plays the bull is quite good in this too.

Yes, we do get to a bull.

A supporting performance, yes.

A supporting performance. So, they're doing this and then our crew is like heading over to get ready to infiltrate once the power, the dust fence has been switched and is flipped. But meanwhile, en route to the little security cabin where the power station or whatever is, I don't even know that I want to point this out or mention it because there's a point where a calf that approaches...

Oh god, Ian, starts suckling on the cow's teat, but it's basically... Nigel treats it like he's receiving oral service from the cow and that's a really... that's a cringy, that's a cringy beat, yeah.

Yeah, let's move on.

It gets worse later. Rivers and the Resistance fighters infiltrate the fortress, so the power is taken down.

There's a great gag where Latrine has a grappling hook and he keeps throwing it up into the air and it keeps coming back down, straight down, and they keep running away, and they run away from it and they do it like three times. And then finally, finally, Latrine like literally tosses a guy up on the wall and they climb over... Oh, it's not. OK, let's just keep going. I don't even...

And then he's holding on. He's not given time to climb up over the wall.

He's clinging to the wall.

As a human grappling hook. And then Chocolate Croissant or Chocolate Moose climbs up over him and rivers and everybody. And it's just... It's anyway, so it's so dumb. They... Then we get a realization, a revelation.

Do we?

In the cow costume.

Oh, that's right. Inside the cow, yes.

Because they've done their part of the mission. This duo, Nigel and one of his resistance fighters, who is the head of the cow. And Nigel says, no, we have to go back because he wants to turn the power back on and trap them. And then he's...

And that's where we learn that Nigel is the traitor.

We learn Nigel is the traitor. But before they're able to do that, what do we hear? I...

Paul, you keep going.

I'm here for the...

The Jaws theme as a bull appears... Oh, God, that's right.

As a bull comes close.

Yeah, the Jaws theme, because they couldn't make that gag even more...

Unseen to them. And the bull does not just attack them.

It proceeds to mate with the cow quite aggressively.

To mouth it with the cow and with Nigel, who is the rear of the cow.

Again, yes, we cannot make enough jokes about gay code and getting, yeah, whatever.

It's very disturbing. Anyway, the Rivers and the Resistance finally find Flemond, who apparently was a day away from completing his tunnel.

That's right.

It's like the New Jersey Turnpike tunnel or something.

Yeah, it's like, literally, he goes, oh, I was just about to finish my tunnel. And Mick looks under the bed, which is where the tunnel is, right? And they cut to a shot, literally, of the New Jersey Tunnel. Like with signs, the whole thing.

Then we cut to, Hillary is waiting patiently by the truck, their truck for their escape. Like she's ready for the escape, but then discovers the stash of carrier pigeons, and it starts connecting the dots as Nigel appears, and he has difficulty walking at this point.

He's having some difficulty walking.

And he holds her at gunpoint, kidnapping her, and now like she knows, oh my God, he's betrayed them all.

It turns out the sailors who raped him were Russian, so he's a communist.

And they get, yeah, who rescued him off the boat, and blah, blah, blah. I mean, off the island, in the backstory. Then they, at gunpoint, then he takes her in the truck, and they leave the rendezvous point. So then Rivers and The Resistance arrive where Hillary and the truck should be. They learn from then the other cow guy who escaped Nigel that Nigel's the traitor. We get the four Pinto gag. It doesn't matter.

Okay, so we have the big phone gag here, which is that the Germans find out there's an attack going on.

Yes, because Rivers then decides he's going to go after Hillary as the others then go to the airfield to take Fulmond to the airfield to escape. And then Rivers gets on like a great escape, yeah.

And he jumps over the great escape fence, and then he jumps over five buses like Evel Knievel. Again, a reference no one's going to get who isn't under 40.

Yes, but yes, at some point we get the giant phone gag.

Yeah, which is there's a phone ringing in the foreground. The commandant goes to pick it up. The phone's not in the foreground.

We think it's a forced perspective shot.

And it is.

Surprised.

It is a force.

We don't realize it's a force.

Yes, exactly.

Until he picks up the phone and it's massive.

It's a giant.

And then so the Germans come after us. And one of the things that happens is the Germans are chasing after us on a on a on a on a jeep. We evade the Germans somehow. The Germans suddenly are in a collision course with the back end of a Ford Pinto, which they wind up tapping just ever so gently.

They slow to a crawl and then just basically give the Ford Pinto bumper the gentlest of love taps. And it immediately explodes.

In an explosion that would put the film Die Hard to shame. Why? Because in the 70s, there was a car named the Ford Pinto and the Ford Motor Company was sued because they were saying the gas tank was too close to the back of the car. This was a huge national headlines. If you're under 40, no clue.

Well, this also led to celebrity status for Ralph Nader, who famously wrote-

Exactly, yes, wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, yes.

And this made him a celebrity and led to-

Him splitting the vote in 2000, which led to George W. Bush becoming president, which is why we're in this room right now.

Yeah, why we're in the dark timeline to this day.

Wow.

We then get sort of, I don't know if this is intentional, but it feels like it, a bit of a homage rip-off of the Raiders of the Lost Ark truck chase scene in Indiana Jones. Now, Rivers catches up on the motorcycle to the truck and starts fighting Nigel, who's driving it, ends up pulling him out of the truck. They both plummet over a bridge into a river, and they're fighting under water where there's an ex.

You get to, you say it, I don't, I can't even, I can't even.

At the bottom of the river where they sink to as they are fighting under water for an extended period of time.

Yeah.

They find themselves in an underwater Western saloon.

And the entire fight becomes a parody of old West movies down to there being a bar with an underwater bartender who comes out from behind the bar and breaks a bottle.

Cowboys playing cards at a table all under water. Again, just absurdity.

We're like, literally, this is the end of the movie, and this just happens. And we're just like, what?

Anyway, he defeats Nigel, emerges from the water. Hillary is there with his motorcycle, finds him safe and alive, and her bosoms literally start to glow.

Yeah, another weird side gag.

It's a choice.

Yeah, it's a choice.

Rivers and Hillary then arrive on the motorcycle at the plane on the airfield. She reunites with her father, but she is torn because she feels like she has to stay and fight with the resistance to free East Germany. And then there's the whole riff on the, as long as they're blah, blah, blah, the Jimmy Stewart, if I'm getting that right, monologue. Like there are all sorts of like layers and layers of references move within things to try to get this movie to end.

Because it won't.

And to get her on the plane and like thinking it's a Casablanca moment, but no, Rivers and Hillary then get on the plane. And then she's saying farewell to the resistance fighters and the punchline of that sequence.

She says, I'll miss you, Latrine, I'll miss you, Booth, I'll miss you, Cheval, I'll miss you, Baguette, but I'll miss you most of all, Scarecrow.

And the Scarecrow from Wizard of Oz.

And there's a dude in a Ray Bolder costume there and they hug and then she gets on the plane.

And they fly off, the plane takes off and then abruptly we get the end in like a Casablanca script font, credits roll. The movie's just kind of done. It's like, okay, we're done.

It's insane. Paul, this movie is such an artifact of a world that doesn't exist, that few people will understand watching Moving Forward. It's a crazy, crazy movie, you know?

Yeah.

And it's something that could have only happened because they made Airplane! and made a ton of money and somebody said, here's a bag of money and a bag of drugs.

Go do whatever you want to do.

And so this is not just a mixed bag. It's a grab bag. It's just like whatever we feel like. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. And it just doesn't all work. But the stuff that works is pretty great.

And by the way, watch any one of the scary movies and watch this and tell me.

Do I have to?

No, don't. Because I mean, look, this is a misfire, but even by the standards of a misfire by Zucker Abramsucker, it is so much more clever, so much more interesting than any of the parodies of the movies that you have.

It's shorter than this podcast probably will be. And Val Kilmer, man, in peak form as he's like emerging and on the cusp of working out.

Honestly, worth it just to watch him do Tutti Frutti, just to hear him do Tutti Frutti.

It's like, oh yeah, yeah, he's going to go on and play Jim Morrison, The Doors, like he's got some real talent as a star performer.

But I got to tell you, Paul, that whole opening title sequence where they're skeet surfing and you're hearing those four different beach, it's excessive. It goes on forever and the songs keep changing, but they keep getting, but they keep getting clever. And I think the whole thing is like a Dadaist haiku. I love it.

There's a lot to love in this movie. There's a lot that annoys the shit out of me.

Right.

And that's the deal. Like you, yeah.

But I'm glad, but I'm glad we live in a world that has this movie in it.

But I will say that I think this is a movie that's hard to watch by yourself. If you're watching with a group of people, people have been laughing at different times and it's going to be infectious and you're just going to give in.

Yeah, I agree. This is a movie, a good hang party movie with adult beverages.

Yeah, I think you have like, you play Airplane! and then you play this, you know, as a kind of...

Yes, you could. Or you play...

Like when the party's breaking up, everybody's walking around.

Or you play this and Rocky III for the...

Yeah, Leroy Neiman.

Do a Leroy Neiman double feature.

Producer Brad, how did this movie do when it came out? I can't imagine this was like a blockbuster. Well, how did it do?

So Top Secret opened on June 22, 1984. It was number seven for The Weeknd with $4.4 million. There were three other new films. Rhinestone and Karate Kid were both in the top five ahead of Top Secret.

Wow.

And The Pope of Greenwich Village came in at number nine.

Wow.

For the year, Top Secret was the 57th highest grossing film, two slots behind Lasseter. I'm going to keep pumping Lasseter. You guys someday will get there. And two ahead of Stephen King's Fire Starter.

Wow. Wow. Okay.

So not the most successful Zucker, Abrams, Zucker effort. No. After this, they made Police Squad, and that bears dividends to this day.

I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't realize until today that all their films had exclamation points.

Oh, yeah. That's right.

Police Squad, Airplane!, and yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

And Hotshots, which was not Zucker, but Abrahams, right?

Yeah.

I believe so.

So, guys, so now this has happened.

Yeah.

Lasting cultural impact. I'm fine. So what's on next week? What are we looking at?

All right. So next week is June 29th, 1984, the weekend before the July 4th holiday.

Amazing.

We have three options.

Yes.

Here are the options. First up.

Cannonball Run 2. Wow.

Wow. Yes. Okay.

Dom DeLuis, Sammy Davis Jr., Jamie Farr, Mary Lou Henner.

Tali Savalas, Shirley MacLaine. By the way, special guest appearance by Frank Sinatra.

Jackie Chan, if I'm not mistaken. Jackie Chan.

Yes.

I could live a very long life without ever seeing this film. That's just me.

I have seen it.

I still bear some psychic scars.

Did you live a long life?

It's been a long life since I've seen it. Not eager to revisit.

Also, Richard Keele, if you saw him.

Yes, Joss from the Bond film, of course, Joss shows up.

Yeah.

So what else do we got?

Option two.

Conan the Destroyer. We've seen him be the barbarian. Now he's the destroyer.

The lesser Conan and I should say also, dear listeners, since we last recorded a Conan film, of course, the incredible Conan the Barbarian.

Oh, that's right. It's going to be rebooted, isn't it?

We have gotten an announcement that Mr. Schwarzenegger is returning to the role. After many, many failed attempts, King Conan is allegedly going to finally be made by Christopher McCrory, writing and directing.

Look, I am dubious.

Yes.

Because Arnold, look, we all love Arnold, but he's getting up there.

I'm excited.

If it's Conan as Lear, I'll handle it. But if they actually want to get me to buy the idea, they can still lift up that service and take some sushi with it.

I also think it's easy to announce a project. It's hard to actually make and release one.

Let's actually make the project.

We'll see if this actually happens.

I mean, the mind boggles of what...

That guy has made billions for his corporate overlords at Paramount. I imagine he can write it.

And to see Christopher McCrory in this genre, I find just very exciting. Then the fact that it's King Conan on top of it, anyway.

But sadly, this is not that movie.

This is not that movie.

So let's see what else we got.

It's not a great movie. It does not hold up.

Here's the last movie, the last option for next week.

Oh, boy.

Oh, dear Lord. Bachelor Party.

No, Bachelor Party.

I say Conan. I say Conan.

Yes, even Lesser Conan.

Is, yeah, Bachelor Party.

It may not be what's best in life, but it's not that.

But it's a sequel to the movie that told us what was best in life.

And Grace Jones.

Grace Jones. And Will Chamberlain.

Yes.

Because he's a star of stage and screen.

Will Chamberlain. And look, here's the thing. I'm here to break down the movie, not to take down the movie. I think that's our new thing. We don't want to get too negative on it. But I don't want to do these sex comedies from the 80s because they're depressing. And as much as I love Tom Hanks, I just don't want to deal with the attitudes toward women back then. But so I'll just say Bachelor Party. Tom Hanks is every bit as funny as you wish he were. And everything else in the movie is pretty. Yeah. So Conan, Conan.

Cannonball Run 2, a lot of celebrities of the times and pseudo celebrities, a very star wattage and just a lot of gags.

Somebody once said that if a movie, if a movie, if the value of a movie were measured by the fun that was had by the people making the movie at the time they were making the movie, then the greatest film ever made would be Cannonball Run 2. However, or Stroker Ace, or Stroker Ace, yeah, because they were clearly having fun making that movie. But yeah, nobody was thinking of the movie.

So we're, so if we had not done Stroker Ace, I might be more inclined to venture into Cannonball Run 2. But I don't know.

I just don't know if I can handle it. I don't know that there's demand or interest there. No, there is not. But so next the next time we will, we will take you to the days of high adventure. And until then, we will see you in line at the multiplex.