A few decades earlier, Spies Like Us could almost have been one of the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies. However, what is on screen never even comes remotely near the level of cleverly self-effacing wit in that duo’s films and is only bumbling lowbrow slapstick. The exam sequence and the scenes where Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd are forced to pose as doctors and conduct an operation are mind-numbingly awful – the two actors mug in a way that makes Three Stooges look like art. For what is supposedly a slapstick action film, John Landis’s pace moves as though through treacle. Elmer Bernstein’s score thumps away with overblown ghastliness. The storyline is a mishap but the worst part is when it decides to take itself seriously in the last five minutes – there comes the sudden threat of world annihilation but suddenly all parties find love in one another’s arms in a heavy-handed message of East-West cooperation, before a groan-inducing moment where Dan Aykroyd suddenly remembers the missile can be reprogrammed.

Like many of his other films, John Landis packed Spies Like Us with cameos that run like a trivia list – director Terry Gilliam, cult special effects artist Ray Harryhausen and Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) co-writer Charles McKeown appear as the doctors in the desert, and there are appearances from Bob Hope, Muppeteer Frank Oz (who has made cameos in all of John Landis’s films), director Costa-Gavras of Z (1969) and Missing (1981) fame, director Larry Cohen of It’s Alive (1974) cult, James Bond effects man Derek Meddings and the film’s cinematographer Bob Paynter packed away somewhere.

John Landis has had a number of other genre films including:- the monster movie parody Schlock (1973), An American Werewolf in London (1981), the infamous first segment of Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983), the famous MTV video for Michael Jackson’s horror movie homage Thriller (1983), episodes of Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), the Mafia vampire film Innocent Blood/A French Vampire in America (1992), the gonzo comedy The Stupids (1996), Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) and a comedy version of the true-life grave robbers Burke & Hare (2010). Landis has also produced various genre tv series such as Weird Science (1994-6), Honey I Shrunk the Kids (1997) and The Lost World (1999).
 

Trailer here:-