Milla gets a female rival in a pretty Victorian girl who's got the hots for the man she "mates" with (yes, yes, they've already gotten down to doing it-though this film is PG-13). The bigger difference in Return is when a boat finds the island and a group lives with the couple, intending to send them off to San Francisco.
We even get another menstrual period scene only, Milla doesn't have the advantage of bleeding in the water, she wakes up to a soiled loincloth. But she dies, leaves them alone and again, they will have to understand their oncoming adulthood all by their lonesome. They also make things like silverware out of shells. The woman tending the kids is much more refined than the pirate of the original film, so they learn more about the world. Here's the convenient part-it's the same island as The Blue Lagoon (hence, "Return") and they find the same hut. But get this, the young boy is actually the son of the original Lagoon couple and after a ship is poisoned with the plague he, another young female child and her mother must row out to a remote island to escape infection. Return, directed by William A Graham, stars two similarly tanned beautiful kids (Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause) who also are left to reside alone on an island.
Return to the Blue Lagoon has even worse intentions than the first movie (and I don't really think The Blue Lagoon had entirely prurient interests, even if underage Pretty Baby star Shields was the hot ticket at the time). So it is with dismay that this film, which was not well received, would spawn a sequel-and a sequel 11 years later. The sexuality would have been the easiest thing to figure out.
But it should have been layered with more problems of understanding their world and growing beyond sex and babies and civilization. I'm not going to spoil the ending, but it's interestingly dark for a film like this. And yet, there are moments here that are potentially fascinating. Now I understand they are essentially teenage children attempting to understand why hair is growing in strange places, but given the acting talent of the leads, the film should have relied more on showing and not saying. But not after lame comments like, "Why are you staring at me?" Answer: "Because you have muscles." Or, when I think of you "I get funny in the stomach." And of course they will start having sex. And since the sailor didn't teach them about things like, uh, menstrual periods, they have to come across their burgeoning adulthood with wonder and horror. Since they were around seven years old when shipwrecked, they learned little of adult ways. When he dies, they are left to their own devices but are just fine, even when "the boogeyman" on the other side of the island frighten them. The sailor teaches them all the Gilligan's Island stuff-like making a cool hut, catching fish, and gathering fruit-that kind of thing. Based on a 1903 novel by Henry Devere Stacpoole, the story has two young, shipwrecked kids living on an island with a craggy old sailor. So again, who the hell is this movie for? Director Randal Kleiser, who also made Grease, adapted (with screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart) the movie from loftier sources. And the kids, at no point, learn the words "fuck" whilst living on their island paradise. If this movie was aimed for the family, there's no reason it could have abstained from nudity-you barely see any in the first place. Nevertheless, this is an R-rated movie and adults, perhaps some perverted adults, must have ventured into theaters to watch 15-year old Brooke and her glued-to-her-breasts hair. Shields' body double) mostly consisting of beautiful underwater shots and fornication via kissing, rolling in the sand and waking up the next morning smiling. The sexuality of the picture is decidedly demure with nudity (by Ms. OKā¦But then, after watching The Blue Lagoon, the child angle is not entirely ridiculous. The picture, released in 1980, was rated R but geared towards children as a learning entertainment to understand sex. That saying, it is also often, quite stupid, quizzically aimed and lamely acted- and not by the more famous Shields who became the first ever "Winner" of a Worst Actress RAZZIE Award - it's Christopher Atkins who stinks up the isle. Gorgeously photographed (by Nestor Almendros) with an almost painfully lovely Brooke Shields in the lead, the picture is oddly engaging. Though some consider The Blue Lagoon one of the worst movies ever made, it isn't that execrable.