Okay, okay — yes, I admit it: The only reason I watched Virgin Paradise is because its no-name leading lady, Zuzana Marlow (née Struss, I presume), and her yellow bikini joined forces to become an arresting visual highlight of 1985’s The Tower, a Canadian SOV SF thriller, and this comedic caper appears to be her only other prominent role in a filmography as slim as her Venus Swimwear figure.
Despite its come-hither title smack-dab in the golden age of teen sex comedies, Virgin Paradise contains no sex. This made-for-TV cheapie is called that only because of its eventual locale of the Virgin Islands. That’s where three newly minted college graduates — the only grads that year, judging from the otherwise barren Toronto campus as they exit the ceremony — head to celebrate all that pomp and circumstance. Marlow is Samantha, the rich girl obsessed with money. Her Tower co-star Charlene Richards, is Candice, the black girl obsessed with men. And Gloria Gifford (This Is Spinal Tap) is Julie, the divorced girl obsessed with alimony checks.
The Schick Hydro Silk razor strip of a story upturns the girls’ vacation plans, as they charter a boat christened Bad Timing — I’ll say! — on which smugglers have stashed emeralds worth $3 million or $6 million, depending on the scene. The jewels look like beads borrowed from a game of Pente, and Candice hides them in her container of hair gel. Sitcom setup firmly in place, the girls run afoul of pirates, one of whom resembles a squatty James Brolin. Our heroic trio also gets lost in the Caribbean, because that’s what comedy rules dictate right after you wonder aloud, “Look at all these little islands. How could we possibly get lost?”
Did writer/director Ron Standen possibly think the material was funny? One punchline in the action-packed (relatively speaking, of course) finale has Samantha utter in exasperation, “I said ‘distraction,’ not ‘total destruction!'” For the Canuxploitation faithful who eat up these video-lensed Emmeritus Productions, its threadbare funding, two-left-feet plotting and — if we’re grading on a curve — amateurish performances will not disappoint. The pleasure they’ll derive is not the kind Standen intended … except for the endless scenes of Samantha, Candice and Julie in more bathing suits than can be counted — mission accomplished there, my good man.
Presumably to get the running time to the magic 90-minute mark, Virgin Paradise comes with a wraparound sequence featuring the gorgeous Marlow as a different character. Speaking in a baby-doll voice (which is most annoying) and wearing skimpy lingerie (which is most welcome), she relays the story to her diary — and the viewer — complete with interruptions throughout. One of her lines is “I kept thinking to myself, ‘Self, if only I had a camera to record it all. What a movie it would make.’” It did not. —Rod Lott