April 16: Dead Fad — Find a fad, look for a movie about it and share.

Before it was a standardized extreme sport with professional leagues, paintball was part of a larger, slightly more chaotic campus fad called The Assassination Game. Students would stalk each other through dorm halls and libraries with suction-cup darts or water pistols. Gotcha! took this localized craze and elevated it into a Cold War spy thriller, suggesting that if you could navigate a UCLA library without getting hit by a paint pellet, you were basically halfway to being a CIA operative.

Jonathan Moore (Anthony Edwards) is a veterinary student at UCLA and an expert at Gotcha, a game where students hunt down one another with paintball guns. Look for the LJN tie-in line of Entertech line of paintball and water guns and the NES game, Gotcha! The Sport, which wouldn’t come out until 1987 and is only the paintball tournament from the beginning of this, but yes, it is a tie-in game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l56iJ5Klncc

Jonathan and his roommate, Manolo (Nick Corri), travel to Paris during spring break, where Jonathan meets Sasha Banicek (Linda Fiorentino) and loses his virginity. I mean, that’s a big jump from nerdy paintball-playing virgin to aggressive cuddling with the star of The Last Seduction, but good for him. Of course, there are all sorts of complications, as she’s being tracked by Russian spies. Turns out she’s a CIA agent from Pittsburgh. 

Shout-out to this movie for featuring “Two Tribes” and “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood on the soundtrack.

Gotcha! was directed by Jeff Kanew, who also filmed V.I. Warshawski, Tough Guys, Troop Beverly Hills and Revenge of the Nerds. It was written by Dan Gordon (Tank, Let There Be Light, Passenger 57).

This movie is not Tag: The Assassination Game, nor is it Paintball Massacre or Masterblaster.

I definitely rented this from 7-11 off a spinner rack as a kid and was shocked by how much I liked it. Maybe I, too, dreamed of being a nerd spy, which never happened.