Before Goose ... before Greene ... there was ... : "Gotcha!"

Words can't describe the excitement I felt when I saw this movie would be on HBO.

They also fail to capture the disappointment I felt while watching it. Not since "Strange Brew" has a movie lost so much from the time I saw it as a young teen to my current stage of adulthood.

I think I was 13 when I first saw "Gotcha!" on HBO, and it was cool. Dude, that guy's shooting people with paint pellets! I've never seen that before! And now he's caught up in some spy thing with Russians and East Germans! I wish something cool like that would happen to me!

Twenty years later, millions of people are running around shooting each other with paint guns, and there's no more Berlin Wall. Worse, Anthony Edwards has been bald for a long, long time, making the sight of him with wavy blond hair almost as laughable as this silly plot.

Edwards plays a college student who plays a game in which he and other crazy kids shoot each other with the aforementioned paint. Astute cineasts will note this idea is borrowed (to say the least) from "TAG: The Assassination Game," which came out a few years earlier and had college students using toy guns that shot those little suction-cup darts. (I love those!)

But the game isn't really the point, since Tony E. and his pal -- the guy who also played Cerulo, the locker-head-butting player in "Wildcats" -- are off to Europe. In Paris, Edwards meets the exotic and mysterious Sasha (Linda Fiorentino, post-"Vision Quest," pre-"Last Seduction"), who takes a liking to this "weirgin" and entangles him is her secret affairs. That includes a jaunt to East Berlin, where Edwards gets all paranoid. (I gotta tell you, that Iron Curtain stuff seems totally weird now.) Our hero eventually has to escape and work his way back home to L.A., but the bad guys follow, leading to a showdown on his college campus. I wonder if this fun little game he plays suddenly will be relevant?

Watching "Gotcha!" as a thirtysomething was kind of painful. I mean, this movie is pretty stupid. Sure, Edwards and his buddy have a few funny lines. Sure, Fiorentino's accent is kind of hot. Sure, it's fun to see the college dean from "Revenge of the Nerds" turn up as Edwards' professor. But as a whole, the movie is just dumb. And you know what? I'm not even sure that was Edwards' real hair.