Verdict
Summary
A surprise release to Blu-ray from MVD, Paradise Bungalows is now available for the first time on disc! Previously only available on VHS from Vestron, the film looks and sounds great in high definition, and the big bonus feature here is that they’ve also included the soundtrack on CD! Wow! Amazing! I wish every obscure film like this got a bonus soundtrack CD album. Kudos to MVD for this fun release!
Plot:
A bet amongst teens to see who can get the “virgin queen” into bed first turns into an event.
Review:
Two Canadian high school jerks look on in envy at “The Virgin Queen of St. Francis High,” a cute girl named Diane (Stacy Christiensen) and make a bet: Blowhard Charlie (J.T. Wotton) bets 2K that Mike (Joseph R. Straface) can’t get Diane in bed at the infamous Paradise Bungalows by the end of summer. Mike takes the bet and immediately sets forth on his conquest. He starts by sending her flowers, which is something, but then he goes for broke by showing up at the swimming hole all the teens hang out at (a muddy lake), and he almost drowns while trying to impress Diane and her stuck-up friends. He later asks her out and she’s receptive to it, but when she brings him home to her high-class parents, they turn their nose up at him, even when he pretends to be horribly malformed like the Elephant Man in a funny scene where he wears a huge welding mask to a dinner party. Mike keeps trying to appeal to Diane, and she eventually caves and sneaks off with him for the weekend for an overnighter … at the Paradise Bungalows, which is a dump of a hotel right smack in the middle of the woods. While sleeping in separate bedrooms, they get scared by a bear attacking their cabin, and they do sleep together, technically, but it’s all very innocent and genteel. When Mike’s jackass buddy Charlie leaks it out that there was a bet to bed Diane, Mike has to clear his name by playing chicken (with cars) with Charlie in front of all their friends to see who the real man is.
A Canadian tax shelter coming of age film that arrived towards the end of the heyday of teen sex flicks and became obscure almost immediately, Paradise Bungalows really managed to appeal to me in a lot of ways with its very unpretentious approach to teen romance and its fun fantasy sequences where Mike dreams of himself as James Bond, rescuing Diane from the clutches of his nemesis. The film is not really professionally done, which also makes the film even more gratifying since it does manage to entertain and feel rough at the same time. The film’s writer and director Francesco Lucente does a pretty good job with this cast of young people, and the film’s soundtrack is packed with really good songs I’d never heard before, hit-adjacent pop wonders by artists such as Brad Steckel, Brian Island, and Jay Sunday, among others.
A surprise release to Blu-ray from MVD, Paradise Bungalows is now available for the first time on disc! Previously only available on VHS from Vestron, the film looks and sounds great in high definition, and the big bonus feature here is that they’ve also included the soundtrack on CD! Wow! Amazing! I wish every obscure film like this got a bonus soundtrack CD album. Kudos to MVD for this fun release!
