If you ever needed proof that watching teenagers engaging in unmarried intercourse is actually quite boring, here’s The Blue Lagoon for you and your pervert eyes.
Because I vaguely remember watching it as a small child with my parents in the early ’80s, I have occasionally flashed back to various scenes throughout my life, most notably the ingestion of deadly berries on a boat. (I don’t know why Mom and Dad were watching it so often. I hope because it was there on HBO and they were too lazy to change the channel. I hope.)
Sometime in the 1800s, on a boat bound for America, a fire breaks out. Two kids and a salty-dog seaman escape, only to land on a barren paradise filled with plenty of coconuts and bananas, with only the ominous drumming from a nearby tribe to keep them company when the old man dies of bloated drunkenness.
Thankfully, he taught the young boy — who grows up to be Christopher Atkins — how to make shelter and fish while the young girl — who grows up to be a still very young Brooke Shields — learns how to pout when things don’t go her way. Of course, as they get older, sex is discovered — taking up just as much of the film as the waterlogged swimming scenes — and a child is had, leading to most hilarious scenes of terrible parenting.
Directed by Grease’s Randal Kleiser, The Blue Lagoon was the start of what I’m terming his filmography’s “sandy vagina” trilogy, which included the worse Summer Lovers and North Shore. He eventually executive-produced the 1991 sequel, Return to the Blue Lagoon, a movie starring Milla Jovovich that I’m sure is far worse unless, of course, some zombies show up. I seriously doubt it. —Louis Fowler