"The Blue Lagoon with camels" - that was Vincent Canby's review in the New York Times, and it is both accurate and insufficient.

PARADISE (1982) was the screen debut of Phoebe Cates, who was 17 years old during filming. It was shot on location across Israel - Tel Aviv, the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee - by cinematographer Adam Greenberg, who would go on to shoot The Terminator and Near Dark.

Phoebe Cates performed the theme song, which became a pop hit in several countries - more famous than the film it came from.

Both Cates and co-star Willie Aames have said they pushed back against how much nudity the script called for, and that when the producer returned to Canada he added footage using a body double without their knowledge or approval. Cates was reportedly devastated and refused all promotional activities, convinced the film would destroy her career before it had started.

It didn't. The same year, she appeared in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which made her famous in an entirely different register, and Paradise receded into the background of her story. Roger Ebert named it his Dog of the Week. Critics called it tedious, embarrassing, and derivative.

All of that is fair. It is also one of the stranger artifacts of early-80s teen cinema - a film with beauty, a contested production, and a lead who was already better than the material surrounding her.