Hacker Cinema
Hot Shots!
1991 · Film · 85 min
Part of Hot Shots! Collection
Directed by Jim Abrahams
The gang that created Airplane! and The Naked Gun sets its sights on Top Gun in this spoof. Topper Harley is a talented but unstable fighter pilot with an axe to grind: clearing the family name. His mission is to avenge his father and save a mission sabotaged by greedy weapons manufacturers. He also gets involved in a relationship with Ramada Thompson, a woman with an unusually talented stomach. Hot Shots! makes fun of a variety of other films, from Dances with Wolves to The Fabulous Baker Boys.
5 positive2 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
The new Star Wars mess makes it trivial to do a better job than the originals. It's been done before - recent (to me, because I watched Too Gun 1 to prepare for 2) example: Hot Shots has some clever humor, Top Gun is really a pretty dumb movie.
(Top Gun 2 is like a juvenile action flick for adult sensibilities - if that sounds good, you can watch it. It's a quality effort in many aspects.)
> This may be the shortcut to an AI 1,000 smarter than a human.
Well, there are humans, and then, there are former US presidents. I never regarded "Hot Shots" as a documentary, but, i was young, when i first saw it.
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/nov/26/jim-abrahams-airplane-naked-gun
The Hollywood Reporter: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/jim-abrahams-dead-airplane-naked-gun-hot-shots-1236071689/
Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/jim-abrahams-airplane-hot-shots-filmmaker-dead-1235182245/
The submitted seems to present misleading information about Police Squad!: all six episodes of the first series were released (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Squad! ). (The obituary from Variety says that the set will be enriched though: «Paramount is releasing a sequel [of The Naked Gun] in 2025, starring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., directed by Akiva Schaffer and with a story by Seth MacFarlane».)
Edit: HN member Toomuchtodo suggests to consolidate the obituary information above with the general information on Jim Abrahams, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Abrahams
I miss the cheesy but wholesome comedies and parodies of the 1990s and 2000s: Anger Management, Rush Hour, The Cable Guy, American Pie, Scary Movie, Bruce Almighty, Eurotrip, Tropic Thunder, Hot Shots, Borat, Idiocracy, How High, White Chicks, etc.
We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended. Good thing to back-up those old gems as well before they get cancelled/edited to comply with modern sensibilities.
> Top Gun is the emblematic dumb romance subplot. I feel like mostly everyone who watches this movie today for the first time feels similarly negative about it.
You should really see Hot Shots. It has one of the best sex scenes i have ever seen.
Check out Youtube's Free with Ads movies. Seriously. They've got a good selection of great movies (especially comedies) from the 80s and 90s on there.
Naked Gun series, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Idiocracy, The Terminal, Major League, Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Terminator, Delirious, Robin Hood Men in Tights, Captain Ron (crap, it's not free anymore), original Robocop, Secret of Nimh, Ghost, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Silence of the Lambs, Teen Wolf, to name a few.
It's a smaller selection and they don't seem to stay Free for more than a few months, so you have to keep checking it, but there's some good stuff on there.
If you want Chinese exceptionalism, watch Wolf Warrior 2. I watched it in a theatre in London full of Chinese people, and it was a surreal experience, because to me it felt like watching a Chinese version of Hot Shots or similar crazy parody, but nobody in the cinema were laughing.
I really enjoyed the movie, but it also shows Chinese filmmaking reaching the level of over the top patriotism you saw in 1980's US war movies.
American studios eventually turned to mocking that, as in the aforementioned Hot Shots movies and others. I wonder when we get to see the same mocking of Ip-Man and Wolf Warrior by Chinese movies.
>Not that the story should be the main appeal of a parody, just that there must be a good story for the jokes to serve. Although “Airplane!” was a joke- and gag-heavy enterprise, the film had an obvious story with three distinct acts, along with a main character who had a clear arc. “Top Secret!”, though, had major narrative and character issues.
It seems like modern style parodies seem to ignore this point entirely but it is exactly why Airplane and Hot Shots and Naked Gun worked. I can’t think of a single spoof that has worked so effectively since the 90s.