When Randal Kleiser‘s “The Blue Lagoon” was released in 1981, it was an instant sensation; the beautifully photographed tale of sexual awakening between two teenagers (Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins) set against the backdrop of a tropical island paradise combined prurience and elegance in a potent cocktail that audiences couldn’t get enough of at the time. Its $60-million gross against a $5-million budget couldn’t be ignored — especially by other filmmakers looking to replicate its success.
As was so often the case, Italian filmmakers were particularly aggressive in their plagiarism, with films like the now-forgotten “Due gocce d’acqua salata” blatantly ripping off both the premise and the marketing of “The Blue Lagoon.” But the most well-known “Blue Lagoon” imitator came from an unlikely location for an exotic travelogue centered on sensual exploration: Canada.
“Paradise,” which was released in 1982 by now-defunct distributor Avco-Embassy (a studio whose contributions to film culture include releasing “The Graduate,” Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” and John Carpenter’s “Escape From New York”), was the brainchild of producer Robert Lantos, who hired actor-turned-filmmaker Stuart Gillard to relocate “The Blue Lagoon” to the Middle East and financed it with Canadian tax shelter money.
It was a formula Lantos would repeat a couple of years later with “Heavenly Bodies,” for which he hired actor-turned-filmmaker Lawrence Dane to create a cinematic Xerox of “Flashdance.” In the case of “Paradise,” Gillard followed the same basic trajectory of “Lagoon” — a boy and a girl get stranded far away from society and discover their sexuality as they fend for themselves — but moved it to a desert oasis and, smartly, started with the kids as teenagers right off the bat instead of wasting precious screen time on their childhoods.
The resulting movie wasn’t exactly a masterpiece, and it wasn’t even a particularly big hit when it came out in 1982. But Gillard did get lucky in one major respect, which was in the casting of his female lead. When “Paradise” went into production, male star Willie Aames was the name thanks to his role on the popular TV series “Eight is Enough,” but 1982 was poised to be the year of Phoebe Cates.
A gorgeous emerging star who had been a successful model since she was ten, Cates would follow “Paradise” with an iconic role in the now-classic “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” making her teen movie royalty then and forever. The following year Cates starred in the teen sex comedy “Private School” opposite Matthew Modine, and then in 1984 starred in her most famous film, Joe Dante’s “Gremlins.”
For Gen Xers who grew up during the rise of HBO and the glory days of VHS, Cates was a huge star out of proportion to her actual output; she only made a handful of movies, and her best remembered ones are primarily clustered together in the early to mid-1980s. (Had she been cast as Lana in “Risky Business,” a role she lost to Rebecca De Mornay, her coronation as a teen queen would have been complete.)
“Ridgemont High” and “Gremlins” have continued to resonate in the culture in a way that “Paradise” and “Private School” haven’t, not only because they’re unquestionably superior movies but because they’ve never gone out of rotation on streaming and physical media. “Paradise” was ubiquitous on 1980s cable and its VHS box art featuring Cates and Aames gazing at each other sultrily was unavoidable at neighborhood video stores of the era, but it’s been out of print in North America since the late 1990s.
Now, “Paradise” is newly available on Blu-ray from Fun City Editions in a pristine restoration of an extended cut never before seen in the U.S. The transfer, taken from the original negative, is beautiful, and more importantly, restores “Theme from Paradise” to the soundtrack. That song was recorded by none other than Phoebe Cates, who put out an entire album at the time (also called “Paradise”) that also included a cover of “Son of a Preacher Man” and other earworms.
While the pleasures of “Paradise” are largely lascivious ones — its success on video rental shelves was undoubtedly due mostly to the abundant nudity, some of which (to Cates and Aames’ chagrin) was provided by body doubles — like “Blue Lagoon” it offers more honorable aesthetic virtues as well. The photography is by Adam Greenberg, who would go on to an Academy Award nomination for “Terminator 2” and deserved acclaim for films like “Near Dark” and “Ghost,” and the desert locations give the movie an epic sweep that belies its modest budget.
Most of us first experienced Greenberg’s work on muddy analog broadcasts that didn’t really do it justice, which makes the Fun City disc a real treat and shows that Greenberg was crafting beautiful images several years before the likes of Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron got a hold of him. The movie itself is sexy and silly in equal measures, though as film historian Amanda Reyes convincingly argues in the liner notes for the disc, it does challenge the established sexual mores of the 1980s in ways that the other teen films of the era did not.
Unlike “Porky’s” and its ilk (including Cates vehicle “Private School”) it treats sex seriously and questions widespread assumptions about gender roles, though how successfully it does so is open to interpretation. What’s unquestionable is its value as a cultural artifact and snapshot of a moment in film history: an age when teen sex movies dominated, when the Canadian tax shelter system gave filmmakers opportunities to circumvent the studios, and when Phoebe Cates was one of the hottest emerging stars around — just a few years before she would mostly give it all up, to the chagrin of young movie fans everywhere.
