Teenage Sarah (Phoebe Cates) is journeying through the Middle East with her faithful manservant Geoffrey (Richard Curnock), and they have ended up in a Bagdad market where to their surprise they see slave girls for sale there. And the owner of those slaves, known only as The Jackal (Tuvia Tavi), notices the beauty of Sarah and means to have her for his own, whether she wants to comply or not. And she doesn't, so she and Geoffrey join up with a Christian family, including their son David (Willie Aames) and set out for Damascus - but The Jackal won't take no for an answer.
If anyone recalls Paradise today, it's not for any inherent quality in the filmmaking, actor-turned-director Stuart Gillard's debut, but for the fact that it was Pheobe Cates' debut as well, and not only that, but she appeared with very little clothes on, or at times none at all. After the intial troubles with the bad guys, you'll notice the plotline becoming very familiar if you have seen the 1980 version of The Blue Lagoon - that's because it's almost exactly the same. In fact, this could be classified as an uncredited remake so keen is Gillard to recreate the dubious highlights of the Brooke Shields epic.
So whether you want to see this or not boils down to how much you like Phoebe, and if you prefer her to Brooke, because there's very little difference between the films. With this, though, there is an unwelcome element of prejudice as where Rudolph Valentino's The Sheik had its heroine regarding being kidnapped by an exotic Muslim as the most exciting thing to happen to a young gel, here it's the worst thing that could happen and all the Arabs are portrayed as either grudgingly tolerant of Westerners or outright murderous towards them.
Once Sarah and David have been separated from their guardians, with poor old Geoffrey executed and hung upside down by The Jackal, they find themselves wandering the desert on a camel. What to do? The answer to that is head for the nearest oasis, and as luck would have it there's one in the vicinity. This would be the paradise of the title, and within about thirty seconds the couple have built their own house and made their own selection of swimwear out of animal skins, yes, Sarah invents the bikini in this film, set in 1823. But however idyllic it is, there's always the threat of being found by the villains.
And also the threat of being found by a chimp. If there's one thing that this has over The Blue Lagoon then it's the amount of screen time given over to the apes, and David and Sarah acquire a pet called Doc who plays hopscotch and masturbates, though not at the same time. Now, I didn't know that chimpanzees were native to the Middle East, but here they are all the same as sort of a commentary on the relationship between the two humans, for Doc gets his own girlfriend, Eve, just as our hero and heroine are falling in love. If this is beginning to sound sleazy, it's actually sickeningly wholesome, and even though Sarah ends up pregnant (Phoebe used a body double for the sex scenes but that's really her starkers elsewhere) this is part of the back to nature, Tarzan and Jane approach. Paradise is a rip off, but it's not as if The Blue Lagoon was any good in the first place, and the bratty Aames is every bit Christopher Atkins' equal in the charm (or lack of it) stakes. Music by Paul Hoffert.
