Jamie
Lilli and Richard are a couple of crazy kids marooned on a tropical island. Fending for themselves they grow up together and eventually (beautifully, magically, truly, madly, and deeply) fall in love and start boning. Will they get rescued and ruin their perfect tropical utopia… uh… before it’s too late? Find out in… The Return to the Blue Lagoon.
How?! Picking up right where we left off in the last movie, Richard, Em and little Paddy are found in their drifting boat by a passing ship. Em and Richard have finished their mortal journey, but the child is alive. Hooray. Brought on board everything is wonderful… psych! This ship is totes filled with cholera and the kid is left with a mother and her child Lilli adrift in a small boat with a nasty sailor. Kicking that jokester to the curb, the mom and kids sail their way to the beautiful, natural blue lagoon and start living it up in the fun tree house from the first film. Growing up together they are super into god and each other and surviving. The mom dies of pneumonia and through the years Lilli and Richard grow up together and Lilli is into Richard and Richard is into Lilli, but they don’t know how to express that. Being all macho he’s like, whatever I’ll even go to the other side of the island where we aren’t supposed to go. There he sees the religious rituals of the visiting natives (thank god, we’ll finally get that resolution from the first film) and Lilli is super worried. Returning to camp they make up and make out and their natural love blossoms and it’s beautiful. They get married (obvs) and bone for the next couple months, but then are surprised when a passing ship stops in for fresh water. The captain is intrigued by the half educated, half ignorant kids and the captain’s daughter is intrigued by Richard’s sweet muscles and one of the sailors is intrigued by pearls and shiny objects. This all culminates in jealousy by Lilli and an attempted assault by the sailor, which Richard fends off. They ultimately decline the rescue and have a baby and live happily ever after. THE END.
Why?! Why is the sky blue? Why does the sun shine? Why is life? All these things just are. Like this film. It just is and Lilli and Richard are just meant to bone naturally and beautifully for all eternity. Forever and ever. Amen.
Who?! Going back to the well. Young Richard is played by none other than Garette Henson… who? WHO?! That’s Guy Germaine from the Mighty Ducks. The very Guy who is dating Connie Moreau. He’s a legend. Interestingly the very same year he portrayed a young Richard in this film he also portrayed the young Tom Kimball (aka the President) in 1990’s Captain America. This dude had beautiful natural love on an island with Milla Jovovich, dated Connie Moreau for Team USA/The Mighty Ducks, and was president. My lord.
What?! It’s crazy in this one when that case of cold, refreshing Coca-Cola washes up on shore and Richard takes a sip and says “Our love isn’t the only natural, beautiful thing on this island any more.” It’s crazy. Besides that though, we still don’t get any damned resolution with those natives. They even get a bit kinder in this one, no longer practicing human sacrifice and pleasantly interacting with Richard. Time must have softened them.
Where?! South Pacific for days. They are even a little clearer in this one talking about how weird it is that the island is not on a map. All this despite the fact that it’s a source of fresh water in the Pacific. I think perhaps the implication is that those pesky natives are killing all the people who stop in there (although we’ve never seen that in all the people that have visited)… or perhaps this is all some big religious allegory and it’s purgatory and Lost ripped this movie off. Who knows.
When?! This one at least gives up an intertitle in the beginning to let us know that we are in the year 1897 and the previous film took place in 1882-1897. Phew. That also means that by the time it got to the end of this film it was what? 1912… maybe a little later. Bros, World War I is about to start. Just stay there and wait it out. But maybe when WWII is going full tilt and you’re like 50 it might be time to jet. C.
It’s no accident that the synopsis of this film is more or less the same shit sandwiched between slightly different slices of bread. I was shocked at just how dire a SECOND viewing of what is essentially the same story would feel to me. Milla Jovovich was beautiful, but she was super unpolished (even sporting a slight Russian accent at this point) and Brian Krause was somehow worse! They even managed to make an already super dumb love story dumber by tying it closer to the Christian concepts only hinted at in the first one. It was hard to imagine that I would come out of this film (which had a much more interesting beginning and end than the first film) thinking it was worse than The Blue Lagoon, but I did. This film was terrible. It served no purpose and we should not have watched it. Thank god next week we have *checks notes* Blame it on Rio… my god. Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! Do you know what I thought when I left the Blue Lagoon? When can I Return to the Blue Lagoon?! Because it was great, I mean, the vistas! Let’s get into it!
P’s View on the Preview – Ah there we are. The sequel is much more well known I think for being a catastrophe. Also somewhat notably a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes with 30 reviews (that is 15th most reviews for a 0% film, that is pretty nuts). So at the very least I had high expectations for this film being terrible. What were my expectations? I wanted just absolutely terrible acting combined with basically the same ludicrous (and pretty grossly exploitative) storyline as the first. Please, just make it a garbage fire. Please.
The Good – I think the last act is slightly more effective than in the first film. Nothing happened in the first film. At least here one of the two interesting things happen: either the heroes meet the natives of the island, or meet people from civilization again. They went with the latter, and it was fine. It is mostly what you would hope it would be from that perspective. Then, once again, the vistas are solid, you can’t go wrong with Fiji as a filming location. Otherwise it is pretty incompetant top to bottom.
The Bad – The acting is crazy crazy bad. You can kind of forgive Jovovich, she very clearly still has a vaguely Eastern European accent. It isn’t thick or anything, but there is just a twang with how she says some words where you can tell she had a slight accent she was trying to cover. Brian Krause though was really really bad, and it sinks the middle bit of the film. The religious undertones to this film are off the chain. You can argue the first film is some vague allegory to the Garden of Eden. Here, they literally stop, and juuuuust before they have sex for the first time, they both agree they should get married. It makes sense in the context of the story maybe, but it is just so weird in the context of what you expect going into the film. Nothing says “natural love” like … Victorian religious undertones? The inevitability of them remaining on the island due to the threat of rape by the sailors is also quite distateful I think. Also the film is just plain boring. Like the first one.
The BMT – The biggest crime this film commits is being boring. I think maybe if I watched it again out of context maybe I’d get why the Razzies and other bad movie sources think the film is amusing. It is mostly boring, with the film just feeling like a television movie and incompetently made throughout. Its biggest claim I think will come from when we complete the 0% on Rotten Tomatoes list. Did it meet my expectations? No. It is catastrophically made, and pretty gross in my opinion. But it is too boring to be a true garbage fire. It is like a garbage fire where there isn’t any actual flames. You know the garbage is on fire, and soon enough it’ll be a smoking ruin. But the fire itself is boring and just … smells like garbage. Nailed that analogy, 10/10 perfect landing.
Roast-radamus – Once again a nice Setting as a Character (Where?) for the fictional (Fijian?) island of Palm Island. It is a character, with its own personality across both films. This is a definite Secret Holiday Film (When?) as a very vital section of the film takes place during Easter and features an Easter egg hunt. I think I’ll leave it there. There is an outside shot at Bad for this one maybe, but I bet we’ll get better ones in the back half of the year.
StreetCreditReport.com – This film was indeed featured on Ebert’s list of worst films of 1991, so immediately there is a ton of cred there. It also obviously has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, truly rarified air. It is a sequel to a terrible film, and was nominated for five Razzies. It has a ton of cred, and that isn’t even considering that it might be the worst shipwreck film ever made … wait. No. The Island of Dr. Moreau exists. Whatever, it is like top three.
You Just Got Schooled – You might be sitting there thinking to yourself “there is no way Patrick would actually watch the third totally unrelated Lifetime original Blue Lagoon film, right?” WRONG. That’s right, I watched Blue Lagoon: The Awakening. You might think this has very little connection to BMT, but it actually stars Brenton Thwaites who is the legit star of Gods of Egypt and the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which is pretty crazy. The film has almost no connection to Blue Lagoon itself though, although they had to have filmed it with that in mind because the one and only Christopher Atkins, star of the original Blue Lagoon, plays a huuuuuuge role in the film as the lost students’ teacher. The storyline is basically just a teen rom com about two high school students who accidentally get stranded on a Caribbean island (for three months!!) … and that’s it. I mean, they have sex and stuff. And they talk about love and life, loss and hope. We grow together, and learn to never give up! Jeez guys, I’m not crying, you’re crying. F. This movie is awful and I hated every moment I wasted watching it.
Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 