Risky Business

Risky Business is a cult classic that seems to kinda sum up the mood of the decade "Anything is possible if you apply yourself..."

Cruise, starring in his first smash hit role after previously making a small splash with the military academy drama "Taps", plays the young Joel Goodsen who, after meeting a 'lady of the night' (played by DeMornay in her debut role), ends up becoming his own businessman in that area and incurring the wrath of 'Guido The Killer Pimp' (excellently played by Joe Pantoliano, who would later go on to star and co-star in many landmark 90's movies like "The Fugitive" and "The Matrix").

Joel (Cruise's character) is, at the start of the movie, your typical upscale teenager worried about his grades and committing minor 'fractures' of his parents trust by, for instance, taking out his father's Porsche when he had been expressly forbidden from doing so. As the movie goes on though, he is taken through a sequence of events that drag him ever deeper on a whirlwind ride into the underground 'business' of 'personal services' from which the viewer wonders if he will ever recover...

Saying much more about the plot would spoil the movie, but Risky Business was very well written and directed by Paul "True Crime" Brickman and was the surprise hit that first brought Tom Cruise to the masses. It also surely was one of the reasons that the Ray-Ban Wayfarer style sunglasses became such a mainstay of 80's wardrobe.