Review of Top Secret! (1984) by Lee (The Lumbering Dead) Munday — 14 Dec 2008

I would've given this film five stars for the cow in wellies sequence alone.

I mean pardon the pun, but they milked that gag for everything it was worth and it's just a relentlessly funny barrage of cow-visuals. Lets break it down shall we?

The plan. Two members of the French resistance don a pantomime cow costume to infiltrate a Nazi fortress and cut the power to the alarms and electric fences.

1. It's clearly a real cow.

2. With wellies on.

3. And perfectly round black spots.

4. The Nazis fail to spot this merging with the herd.

5. It moos in a French accent.

6. A calf starts suckling at its udders to the obvious pleasure of the guy in the back (Oooh. Oooh yeah!). Why would his cock be in one of the udders?!

7. When they have to break a vault door to access 'Das Fencen Switchen' the resistance guys don't take off the costume. The real cow head in shot checks its watch on human hands which then place a stethoscope in its ears and have it nonchalantly take a drag on a cigarette as the combination dial is twiddled. (As a young teen watching this, I lost most of my piss and the ability to breathe in at this point).

8. The guy at the back turns traitor just as a randy bull enters the scene. Cue the shot inside the cow of the guy at the back screaming as the bull mounts to the sound of shredding cloth and the Jaws theme.

And that's just one sequence. The rest of the film is endlessly quotable (what phony dog-poo?), every character given at least one nugget of pure comedy gold, not one cameo is wasted, the songs are a riot and genuinely catchy. Basically not one gag fell flat for me and I would rate this as one of the funniest films I've ever seen. Maybe even better than Airplane!