Around the World in 80s Movies – Details, episodes & analysis

After a replay of the climax of Rocky, Rocky II picks up exactly where the first film leaves off, with Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) and Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) taken to a nearby hospital after suffering serious injuries caused by the pummeling each fighter took in their 15-round contest.  Creed won the bout by a split decision, but the victory isn't so sweet, as many fans accuse him of helping Balboa along, while some even think Balboa should have been declared champion.  Contrary to what he said after the fight was over, Creed wants a rematch, but Balboa, at the urging of his girlfriend (turned wife in this film) Adrian (Talia Shire), wants to retire from the ring, suffering from limited vision in one of his eyes as a result of the repeated blows he took from Creed's fist.  Between Creed's constant taunts in the media, the inability to find a steady job, and a new house and baby to pay for, Rocky has to face a decision of whether he should risk his life and wife for the money and glory a rematch would provide.

The film tells the tale of Rocky Balboa (Sylverster Stallone), a washed-up Philadelphia boxer who just barely scrapes by, fighting in small clubs for meager pay, while supplementing his income as a thuggish debt collector for a local loan shark.  He doesn't have many ambitions; his only real goal is to get to go out with the shy, mousy pet store clerk named Adrian (Talia Shire), sister to his friend Paulie (Burt Young),  Opportunity comes knocking in a big way for Balboa when the world heavyweight champ, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), wants to fight a "snow white" nobody for the nation's bicentennial.  Rocky agrees and becomes a local celebrity, but with less than five weeks to train, this washed-up fighter has to have the strength, agility, and most of all, heart to have a chance with Creed without embarrassing himself in front of millions.

Roy Scheider plays a newly divorced New York psychiatrist named Sam Rice, who discovers that George Bynum (Josef Sommer), one of his prominent patients, has been murdered. Bynum was the curator of antiquities for Crispin's, a high-scale auction house, who engaged in a sexual affair with Brooke Reynolds (Meryl Streep), a younger woman who worked with him. During his counseling sessions, Bynum told Sam all about Brooke in such vivid detail that Sam thinks he might have fallen for Bynum's mistress himself. Those feelings get reinforced when Brooke visits Sam's office to hand him Bynum's wristwatch he left in her apartment the night of his death. Sam becomes infatuated with Brooke, but as he pursues her romantically, he's also frightened of her because she might be Bynum's murderer. As the police press him for evidence, Sam begins following Brooke to learn more, only to feel she might already be stalking him as her potential next kill. Robert Benton writes and directs.

Chevy Chase plays a Los Angeles Times investigative reporter named Irwin M. Fletcher (he prefers to be called by his nickname, “Fletch”) under the pseudonym of Jane Doe. While working undercover trying to uncover the secret to a major beachside drug ring, Fletch is approached by a wealthy businessman named Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson) who thinks he is a transient and makes him an offer of $50,000 to kill him. The story is that he has bone cancer and doesn’t want to be around to enjoy the most painful aspects of the disease and wants his wife to get the insurance on it by getting killed. Sensing another scoop, Fletch agrees and soon learns that the two stories he is covering are almost one and the same. Michael Ritchie directs this silly but witty comedy.

Shelley Long plays prissy longtime acting student Lauren Ames who has never gotten an actual gig, finally finding some hope when she makes her way into a prestigious drama class led by an all-time great international acting coach. Bette Midler co-stars as Sandy Brozinsky, a mouthy, earthy waitress who also suddenly finds herself in the same class without any of the talent or desire to be there. The two have a personality clash immediately that only gets worse once it is discovered that they are both in a relationship with the same dreamboat of a man, Michael Santers (Peter Coyote), who ends up faking his death for reasons the ladies have to put aside their petty differences to discover, mostly to make him choose between them. Their collaborative adventure sees them go on a cross-country trip only to find that there is so much more to Michael they never knew, something which gets them on the run from KGB agents and the CIA to hopefully come out alive, with the MacGuffin being a toxin that can destroy all vegetation within miles with just a few drops. Arthur Hiller directs from a Leslie Dixon script.

James Belushi stars as Nick Pirandello, a crude smart-ass that just so happens to be one of the country's top CIA agents, who is ordered to recruit a mild-mannered suburban insurance salesman father, Bob Wilson (John Ritter), a lookalike for a recently iced agent, to join him on a secret mission that may have interplanetary implications that may result in the end of the world as we know it. But Bob is such a sweet-natured man, he needs a crash course in toughening up to the task, which Nick must do in order to achieve the mission's success.  Meanwhile, Bob thinks Nick is off his rocker, particularly when he begins talking like the case involves aliens from outer space. Dennis Feldman writes and directs this zany off-the-wall buddy comedy.

The plot of Spies Like Us involves the two most inept, low-level U.S. intelligence agents they could find to go on a mission as expendable decoys for the real agents. Emmett Fitz-Hume (Chevy Chase) and Austin Millbarge (Dan Aykroyd) were scouted by the CIA after cheating on their advanced placement exams, with a mission that sees them parachuting into Pakistan. From there, the bumbling duo ends up in Afghanistan, where they're mistaken for doctors there on a humanitarian mission for the United Nations, followed by run-ins with the Russians during an effort to draw out the identities of Soviet spies in the area so that the real American spies can complete their mission to check out a news style of Soviet missile launcher. With this launcher, they can send up a Soviet missile in order to test the U.S. anti-missile satellite defenses in order to convince the Soviet Union that they have an edge in technology. John Landis directs this silly slapstick comedy.

This time it's a bit more personal for John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), as his former Vietnam commander and friend, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), has been captured by Russian forces as he tries to rally the Afghan rebels who have been winning the resistance.  The Afghani people are too suspicious of the American to willingly join his crusade to spring Trautman from his prison cell, leaving him to go it mostly alone, with one or two friends he has made in his short introduction to their ranks.  He faces formidable odds, as the prison is surrounded by landmines, tanks, and hundreds of Russians, and the Russkie leadership is as corrupt and uncaring as the worst of them. John MacDonald directs this ultra-patriotic action-war effort from a script co-written by Stallone himself.

The story follows First Blood, where John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is in prison for his one-man army heroics against law enforcement in the first film.  Here, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna) approaches Rambo to undergo a covert operation that will presumably save the lives of thousands of POWs still in Southeast Asia, if he can find evidence that they are still being held captive.  Rambo is hired only to take pictures, but that doesn’t sit well with the disgruntled vet, who uses the opportunity to get them out while he can.  However, corrupt government officials don’t want Rambo to find any POWs, as this would complicate American relations in the area, and when irrefutable evidence is given, the mission is aborted, leaving Rambo all by himself — one man against an army of sadistic Vietnamese and Soviet military advisors, merging America’s former fight with the Cold War enemy of today..

Sylvester Stallon stars as John Rambo, who has spent years trying to track down the only family he ever really knew -- the soldiers who fought alongside him in the war.  To Rambo's dismay, he finds he is all alone, as all of the rest were killed in action, or died from cancerous war-related exposure to chemicals, leaving him but to drift along the roads in search of new meaning to his life.  In the small town of Hope, the local sheriff (Brian Dennehy) named Will Teasle tags Rambo as a vagrant drifter and quickly ushers him out of town.  However, Rambo defiantly tries to return, whereupon he is arrested for vagrancy. When he doesn't quite understand why he is being incarcerated, he resists their strong-arm tactics to get him to comply, triggering flashbacks of his days as a tortured prisoner of war.  Rambo, an ex-Green Beret, perhaps the most lethal of them all, muscles his way out of the station and into the nearby woods, where the police are in hot pursuit.  What they don't realize is that Rambo is a one-man killing machine, with raw instincts for guerrilla warfare and very little to hold his fragile mentality together.  He just wants to be left alone, but the police are going to see to it that he never gets his wish.