The Experts (1989) Reviews

SCTV alumnus Dave Thomas manned the megaphone for the direct-to-video Experts. John Travolta was between career highs when he agreed to appear in this anachronistic cold-war comedy. Travolta and Arye Gross play Travis and Wendell, a couple of vagabonds hired by Soviet spy Cameron Smith (Charles Martin Smith) to act as experts on the American lifestyle. It seems that Smith is in charge of one of those "typical American towns" constructed in the middle of the Soviet Union for espionage-training purposes (remember all those Red-baiting documentaries of the 1950s?) Under the influence of drugs, Travis and Wendell are relocated to the phony burg of Indian Springs, Nebraska (actually well within the Russian borders). They immediately begin indoctrinating their "American" neighbors in all the guilty pleasures of Yankee hedonism. Hardly a comedy classic, The Experts did produce one salutary by-product: it was on the set of this film that John Travolta met his future bride Kelly Preston, here cast as a peaches-and-cream Russian spy. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi