[1] In the film, Jonathan Moore (Edwards) is a shy UCLA veterinary student and the reigning champion at "Gotcha", a campus-wide paintball game.

While on vacation in Paris, he is seduced by an older woman, the sexy and mysterious Sasha (Fiorentino), and soon becomes embroiled in an international espionage operation.

One night, after arriving in East Berlin, Sasha sneaks out of their hotel room while Jonathan is asleep and meets with a German man, who tells her the location of the pickup of her package.

The next day, Sasha tells Jonathan that if she ever instructs him to meet her at the Café Friedrichstrasse, it means that he must immediately leave East Berlin, and hands him a package with a strudel.

That night, while Jonathan rushes to Checkpoint Charlie to cross into West Berlin, Sasha is caught by Vlad and the East German secret police; she is strip-searched by the Soviets, but nothing is found on her.

Jumping into a water canal, Jonathan escapes and stumbles upon a German punk rock band headed for Hamburg, who offer him a ride to the airport.

Soon after Jonathan safely makes it back to Los Angeles, a band of Soviet agents led by Vlad also arrives.

Temporarily arrested for ramming a car, Jonathan returns the next morning to find his apartment broken into and looted.

Sasha admits that she is actually Cheryl Brewster, a CIA agent from Pittsburgh, before Vlad and his henchmen appear and chase the pair through the campus.

was filmed in October 1984,[citation needed] with principal photography in Los Angeles (in and around the UCLA campus), Paris, and West Berlin.

"[4] Giving the film two stars out of four, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the European sequences as "a well-directed cat-and-mouse game" that lost its way in the final act after returning to the United States, with the film's main flaw being a focus on Edwards' character when Fiorentino was far more intriguing: "I'll bet the men who made this movie just assumed it had to be told from his point of view, and never considered hers.