The 1980's are a treasure trove of weird, innovative, ambitious and often misguided cinema. It was the decade that gave us James Bond fighting villains while skiing, a minor science fiction hit that starred an anthropomorphic duck and Val Kilmer defeating an evil scientist with popcorn and laser beams. By far one of my personal favorite oddities from the 80's is Jeff Kanew's 1985 college comedy cum spy thriller Gotcha! starring Anthony Edwards and Linda Fiorentino.

Gotcha! has a strange but impressive cultural pedigree. Its opening sequence and in fact a big part of the film's impressive dramatic second act are inspired by the game "Assassin", then popular on college campuses. The basic premise of the game is that a pool of players are all assigned as one another's "targets" who they will then track down at any time of day and "kill" using various imaginary weapons, like spoons (daggers) or water balloons (grenades). Anthony Edwards stars as Jonathan, a UCLA student who isn't particularly popular with the ladies but is especially good at Assassin. His friend Manolo convinces Jonathan to join him on a vacation to France where the two end up getting entangled in a real-life game of Assassin with some surprisingly thrilling Cold War espionage thanks to a Czech spy played by Linda Fiorentino.

1985 was really Fiorentino's year. She appeared in three films, starring in two of them. She first appeared in Vision Quest opposite Matthew Modine (which was also Madonna's first time on the silver screen), followed that up with Gotcha! then closed out the year in Martin Scorsese's After Hours. It's mostly for Fiorentino's presence that Gotcha! really sells the spy drama that takes place in East Germany during the middle 45 minutes. There are some truly tense moments at the Berlin Wall and in a chase scene amid sets of stark Soviet factories. It's really a pattern in Linda Fiorentino's career that she ends up being the classiest part of a middle-to-low brow project. It's no coincidence that Gotcha! begins as a silly college movie then transforms back into an immature comedy at the bookends. Fiorentino's Sasha doesn't come into the picture until close to a half hour into the film and she mostly disappears until the final five minutes once Jonathan returns to America.

So, why is Gotcha! essentially two different movies mashed together? Well, it's a case of one writer's competing sensibilities. The movie was mostly written by Dan Gordon, who would go on to pen a somewhat bipolar series of films and TV shows, from serious fare like Murder in the First to absolute dreck like Surf Ninjas. Combine that with the directorial style of Jeff Kanew, fresh off Revenge of the Nerds and soon to direct the film that would make a mockery of both Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, Tough Guys, and you have a recipe for a downright schizophrenic movie.

As an artifact of the weird 1980's, Gotcha! is unparalleled. It's 1/3 a great spy thriller and 2/3 an utterly forgettable joke movie like a low-rent Porky's. It describes the brainless excesses of the era at the same time as it depicts some of the darkest anxieties of the late Cold War.