HOT SHOTS
A film review by Greg Goebel
Copyright 1991 Greg Goebel
Somehow I visualize that when the ZAZ team was a gang of kids they were sitting around in a bedroom all with their faces buried in copies of MAD magazine. "Hey, gimme that one." "Nah, already read this one."
And now that they have gone their separate ways we are facing a glut of cinematic MAD-magazine humor. Whether that is a blessing or curse probably depends on how *you* spent your dull afternoons when you were a kid.
So, okay, HOT SHOTS is TOP GUN as reinterpreted by MAD. Is it a laugh-a-minute? Not really. Does it get its yuks? Certainly. So a recommendation is hard to make, other than you might catch it at a matinee or wait until it comes out on video.
I did have one major problem with this movie in that parodying TOP GUN is hard because a movie that had such an agonizingly predictable script as TOP GUN was lethally close to being a parody of itself, and simply because a movie uses lame pathetic obnoxious dialogue as a source of humor makes said dialogue no less lame pathetic and obnoxious. To successfully reduce that to excess means really going over the top and HOT SHOTS only succeeds at that intermittently.
But it does have its moments and I would say stays one step ahead of (if not fly rings around) NAKED GUN 1/2 (not the correct title but the appropriate one).
Greg Goebel gvg@hpislx
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