Stylish but barely mediocre overall

best movie i've ever seen.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's 1823 Baghdad. Sarah Scott (Phoebe Cates) from London catches the eye of slave trader Jackal. She's traveling with the family's loyal servant Geoffrey. David McBride (Willie Aames) is traveling with his missionary parents from Boston. The McBrides joins them in the caravan to Damascus. They are attacked at a stop by Jackal who wants Sarah for himself. Sarah and David manage to escape with Geoffrey but everybody else are massacred or taken as slaves. Geoffrey contacts a Bedouin group but it turns out to be the Jackal and he's killed. Sarah and David manages to find an oasis where they live together in isolation.This tries to be 'The Blue Lagoon' in the desert except it has a bit more porn, soft-core porn. They find a beautiful cave shower for Phoebe Cates to get naked in. The cheese factor is pretty high. In order to copy Blue Lagoon, the young couple manages to get to the sea so that they could do the underwater naked filming. There are even two chimp companions for comic relief. It's pretty sad and on top of it all, it's inherently a copy of another B-movie.

This gripping film is well worth going out of your way to see because Phoebe Cates has a couple of nude scenes, discrete but still nude scenes.Obviously ripped off from Brooke Shields' "Blue Lagoon," this story strands Cates and Aames in a rocky desert paradise, a cavern all ecru and cream, with a built-in shower. They're threatened by aggressive Arabs who live in a patriarchal world in which women -- or even teens like Cates -- are no more than chattel.Nice photography and stunning locations. Israel. The local Arabs look dusty enough but the wardrobe and grooming for the principals doesn't take any chances. Aames wears a loose vest and has a modish 80s hair style. Cates is all in chiffon or whatever it is, pink, fluffy, and contour covering, as befits a proper young lady in 1900 or whenever the story is set, although she lifts those hampering skirts up to her bare knees while trudging across the sand.Aames, a church-going lad who can't act, has an encounter with a belly dancer, which apparently leads him to speculate about any of his body parts that he may have been neglecting, because on his way back to camp he stops to peek in Cates' window (carelessly left often) while she's bathing her upper torso. We are now 13 minutes into the film and already there are hints of rahat lokum to come. The voyeurs by this time are jumping up and down in their seats and we don't want them to think they're forgotten.And, in fact, Phoebe Cates is pretty much unforgettable. She might pass muster as an actress but that's not the point. She was seventeen when this was shot. Her figure is flawless. Her slightly chubby, kewpie-doll face has a tiny, upturned nose, as if drawn with a set of plastic French curves, and she usually holds her pulpy lips parted, baring a set of glistening incisors. Any normal man would want her to bite him savagely.Lost in the desert, fearful of the Arab raiders, they find themselves at a seaside resort surrounded by date palms and citrus trees, fronted by the Mediterranean Sea, and furnished with another gentle waterfall. They adopt a "funny" young chimpanzee who makes faces and shrieks with chimpanzee laughter. He also takes good direction and plays with himself, in the vulgar sense, on cue.Shortly, they are reduced to wearing the scantiest of home-made loincloths and bras. It's an almost perfect reprise of the scenes from "Blue Lagoon" of 1980, or even the 1949 version, or the original novel of 1908 by Henry De Vere Stacpoole. We've seen enough of poor Aames by now to realize his future is going to be limited to used-car commercials. He has all the phones of a nice middle-class kid from El Cerrito and the same acting skills.Little did they know that true love lay just around the corner -- or rather it would have, had this been a carpentered environment. As it is, it must necessarily lie amid the daisies and scarlet poppies that are always found in the middle of the desert.She gets pregnant, their camel dies, and they are stuck among the sand dunes when they're attacked by the vicious Arab throat-cutter. But not to worry. I mean, they never worry, so why should we?

Silly rehash of "The Blue Lagoon". The plot is pointless--this was just made to show Willie Aames and Phoebe Cates as nude as many times as an R rating would allow.Now I like "The Blue Lagoon". Yes it's stupid but Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins had nice bodies and were actually not bad as actors. Beautiful cinematography too. As for this movie--Aames and Cates are young and have great bodies too--but they can't act. The nudity can only carry this movie so far. Without that you're left with a boring story and lousy actors. When I saw it at a theatre the audience was quiet--at first. After the first two nude scenes people started to walk out. Then people started giggling at the horrendous acting. By the end of the film most of the audience was in hysterics laughing out loud at this. I think the part that really set them off was when they showed the monkey miming what Aames did when he "pleasured" himself. That aside the characters were totally obnoxious. Aames comes across as a spoiled brat--Cates came across as not having a brain. Heck, this doesn't even have the beautiful shots that "Blue Lagoom" had! Unless you're desperate to see these two actors nude you can skip this.

Like most of the others, I found a lot of this movie rather trite. I don't blame Aames or Cates for this; I thought they were good actors who did their best with terrible material. The plot is something straight out of a trashy romance novel, which could have worked with better writing but the script is a mess. However, lost in this mediocre feature film is a great 30 minute soft-core porn. The sex scenes are highly erotic, and the nude scenes are done with much better camera work and production than you would typically have in a skin flick. I'm particularly fond of the cave shower scene, where Phoebe Cates positively scorches the camera with her hotness.