Prisoner of Paradise (1980)

Various trashy films have been made about evil sadistic Nazis on exotic deserted islands ranging from Ken Wiederhorn’s somewhat inordinate Nazi zombie flick Shock Waves (1977) to the unintentionally wacky kraut WiP flick Die Insel der blutigen Plantage (1983) aka The Island of the Bloody Plantation directed by Fassbinder superstar Kurt Raab and starring various other Fassbinder superstars like Barbara Valentin and Peter Kern as evil neo-Nazi prison guards who torture and molest poor nubile Filipino girls for sport, but probably none of these films is as patently ridiculous and horribly ‘Hollywood-esque’ as the relatively big budget hardcore porn flick Prisoner of Paradise (1980) aka Nazi Love Island aka Nassau starring porn chic era legends John C. Holmes aka ‘Johnny Wadd’ and platinum blonde gutter diva Seka (Dracula Sucks, Ultra Flesh). Ostensibly co-directed by supposed female pornographer Gail Palmer and Chinese-American Bob Chinn (who was responsible for directing the ‘Johnny Wadd’ series that made Holmes famous), the film was actually co-directed by the latter and a singularly scummy fellow by the name of Harry Mahoney, who is probably best known as the founder of the company Déjà Vu which owns and operates 132 different strip clubs around the United States. Indeed, it was later revealed by various credible sources (including playwright Peter Sagal, who was contracted to ghost-write a still unpublished book for her) that Palmer, who was originally a Playboy playmate, never actually directed any of the films she was credited and that she was merely a front for her mob-backed porn distributor/producer boyfriend Mahoney, who ghost-directed the flicks for her (in fact, in 1984 Palmer sued him for not giving her any of the profits for the films). The first fuck flick that Palmer was credited for was the blaxploitation-hardcore hybrid Hot Summer in the City (1976), which is about a white god-fearing virgin Christian girl who is gang-raped and turned into a sex slave by a group of honky-hating militant black nationalist types. Naturally, considering its subject matter in regard to bestial mandingos raping a little white girl, it should be no surprise that Palmer’s first credited feature was apparently once described by enthusiastic ethno-masochist, perennial cuckold, and shameless negrophile Quentin Tarantino as, “The Greatest Porno Ever.” Of course, Prisoner of Paradise also features the timeless porn gimmick of miscegenation, albeit of the ‘yellow fever’ oriented sort, with Mr. Holmes plowing tight pink Oriental orifices with his semi-erect 13-inch liver-lifter when he is not being ruthlessly ravaged by some carpet-munching Hitlerite sluts who like cunt more than cock. 

 Admittedly, I got the moronic idea to watch Prisoner of Paradise after seeing a somewhat provocative screenshot from the film featuring a Nazi girl holding a Luger next to her pussy, but after getting around to actually watching the not-quite-classic hardcore flick I can safely say that the film had virtually nothing else to offer aside from the fairly brief gun-gash segment. A sort of horrendous abortive mix between the considerably crappy concentration camp sitcom Hogan's Heroes and the insufferably sappy Marlon Brando vehicle Sayonara (1957), Prisoner of Paradise is a totally tedious combination of outmoded vaudeville-esque Teutophobia, unsexy and considerably sanitized sleaze, classic Hollywood style phoniness, and retarded token pro-American sentiment that was typical of WWII era Hollywood war films. As an embarrassing piece of pseudo-melodramatic hardcore kitsch, the film makes the exploitation flick that obviously heavily influenced it, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975), seem like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s swansong Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by comparison. Indeed, no other film makes pussies and totenkopfs seem as cheesy yet hopelessly banal as Prisoner of Paradise. The plodding tale of a lovelorn Jap-loving American sailor who ends up stranded on a remote South Pacific island near the Philippines (though the film was actually apparently shot in Hawaii) after his Navy battleship is bombed and who eventually finds himself the sex slave of a boorish kraut SS commander and his two lethally lurid lily-licking blonde beastesses, the film is ultimately less erotic than Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938).  In fact, I would argue that Prisoner of Paradise is less arousing than the majority of cheap Nazisploitation films like Lee Frost's Love Camp 7 (1969) because at least they have some minor S&M/BDSM appeal.  In short, probably the only notable aspect of the film is that it somehow manages to not mention Jews or the holocaust a single time, but that probably has to do with the fact that it is a rare all-goyim porn production.

 Prisoner of Paradise begins unimpressively enough with protagonist Joe Murrey (John Holmes) washing up onto a remote island with nothing but a raft and the torn sailor’s outfit that he is wearing. As revealed in flashback scenes that were swiped from the Pearl Harbor flick Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) directed by Richard Fleischer (with additional co-directing done by Japanese filmmakers Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku), Joe’s ship was bombed by the Japs. Despite being at war with the dreaded harbor-bombers, Joe is in love with a Japanese prostitute named Sue Lee (Mai Lin) who he planned to marry, but she was tragically killed in an Allied bombing raid. As can be expected from a fuck flick, there are various flashback scenes in the film where Joe recalls fucking Lee before her ill-fated demise.  As depicted in the flashback scenes, only seconds after Joe walked out of her front door after hinting to her that he planned to ask her to marry him the next time he saw her, Lee was tragically killed in the bombing raid (notably, pseudo-director Gail Palmer is featured in a cameo role during this scene where she is in ‘yellowface’ and dressed like a Jap streetwalker). During the first day or two that Joe is on the island, the only company that he has is his bittersweet memories of his beloved yellow pussy-peddler. During his second day at the island, Joe does fairly mundane things like take a shower under a waterfall and cut down coconuts from a tree with a machete that he just happens to have with him. Of course, when Joe happens upon two completely unclad blonde beauties bathing in a creek, Joe cannot help but investigate, even if they lack the yellow skin that he has a special fondness for. 

 When Joe follows the two mysterious blondes, he discovers that they are Sapphic SS sluts that are under the command of a short and bloated SS commander named Hans von Shlemel (Gail Palmer regular Elmo Lavino credited under the pseudonym ‘Heinz Müeller’) who has a special fetish for cracking his whip, especially on the asses of female prisoners, but for whatever reason he does not like to take a hands-on approach when it comes to female flesh. Hans’ two guards are named Ilsa (Seka) and Greta (Sue Carol) and they especially love dining on yank prisoner cuntlet, though they decide to make a special exception when they eventually see Joe's extra long joy prong. Aside from Ilsa and Greta, a tiny yet super stoic Japanese girl named Suke (Jade Wong) is absurdly responsible for guarding the entire Nazi base with a single rifle. Needless to say, Joe is disgusted when he watches an American army nurse named Gloria (Brenda Vargo) being ruthlessly eaten out by Ilsa while Greta forces her to say, “I love the Führer,” as if Uncle Adolf has turned cunnilingus is a form of National Socialist patriotism.  As a cultured mensch that jovially declares, “Wagner will be here when Germany conquers the world...and so will I,” Hans routinely plays the music of Richard Wagner when the lurid carnal ‘tortures’ are carried out. While snooping around the Nazi base, Joe eventually finds another imprisoned American army nurse named Carol (Nikki Anderson) who he naturally promises to help. Ultimately Joe decides to attempt to save both nurses by starting a fire to create a diversion and running inside the Nazi headquarters to get Gloria while Hans and his gals are scrambling to put out the fire. While Joe manages to get both Gloria and Carol off the base and take them to a seemingly safe place in forest, he and the girls are soon found and brought back at gunpoint by Suke after they make the mistake of taking a temporary break in the woods when the nurse complain that they need to rest. 

 When Joe and the nurses are brought back to Nazi headquarters, Nazi she-bitch Greta immediately pats the protagonist down and mistakes his cock for a concealed weapon, which Ilsa subsequently pulls out, thus inspiring Hans to joke, “They thought you had a gun down there. Pretty good joke, yeah?” Of course, Joe does not find Hans very funny, especially after the Nazi commandant attempts to rationalize his sexual sadism by stating that, “it is rather boring on this island. If we did not amuse ourselves, we could go crazy this far from civilization.” After Hans declares, “American girls are lovely creatures. They’re so full of fight and spirit. You should perhaps try a German girl sometime. You ever try a German girl? They have their high-points too, you know…cunning, intelligence, and obedience. They will do anything you want, like Ilsa and Greta here. And right here, my friend, it appears that they want you,” Joe is forced to sexually service both of the SS dykes, with the protagonist first eating Greta’s pussy while she has her Luger pointed at his head and then fucking Ilsa whilst she moans with barely concealed anti-American hatred. Right before Joe blows his load, Ilsa screams, “Don’t you cum in me you American swine,” so he ejaculates on her stomach, thus assuring that the feisty Fräulein will not be impregnated with the mongrel spawn of a stupid American.

 As is fairly predictable, Japanese guard Suke eventually begins falling in love with Joe and even starts grinding her rifle with her crouch while watching him fucking one of the Nazi guards. For his own voyeuristic pleasure, Hans forces to American nurse Carol to suck Joe’s cock, which rather enrages the superficially gentlemanly all-American sailor boy. Hans also forces Joe to fuck Carol and then busts on her face by threatening him and stating, “You want her to live? You’ll put that thing in there.” When Hans declares that he will be whipping Carol after Joe reluctantly blows his load on her face, the protagonist becomes completely irate and declares, “You jerry bastard, I’m gonna kill you, you and those dyke cunts of yours.” Although Hans does not physically torture the protagonist for making the major mistake of insulting a German officer, he does call Joe a “frankfurter-sucking friend” and then informs him that his, “girlfriend will pay dearly” for what he has done. When Joe is led back to his prison, Suke's panties seem to be soaked as she immediately declares her love for the protagonist and the two proceed to fuck while the protagonist experiences flashbacks in regard to plowing the puss of his dead Jap hooker girlfriend (after all, apparently all Asians look the same, so it is not hard for Joe to imagine that the guard is the same person as the dead gutter slut that he fell in love with). When Suke is subsequently accidentally killed in a scuffle after Ilsa starts a bitch-fest due to her jealousy over Greta’s Sapphic infatuation with Carol, Joe becomes exceedingly enraged and finally starts beginning to act like a real man. Indeed, when Ilsa runs to Hans for help after Joe manages to grab a gun, the protagonist screams at her, “Stop, you kraut bitch, or I’ll blow your head off,” but of course she does not listen. Luckily, Joe does not have to do any work in terms of combat (he is a sailor after all), as Ilsa accidentally starts a fire at Nazi headquarters after knocking over a lamp that leads to all three of the evil nasty Nazi dying instantaneously. Indeed, just as Greta mindlessly runs into the burning building to join her comrades, it conveniently explodes. In the end, the film concludes with the epilogue, “Three years after the end of World War II, one American sailor, two army nurses and five children were rescued from a remote South Pacific island near the Philippines…no further details are available at this time,” thus revealing that sailor Joe finally got over his seemingly incurable case of yellow fever. 

 Aside from featuring virtually nil genuinely erotic scenes, Prisoner of Paradise has to have what is one of the least charismatic ‘heroes’ of cinema history. Indeed, Mr. Holmes’ (in)famously long dong does not save him in the film, though his character certainly seems like the sort of insecure white dude that is fairly common nowadays who chases after Oriental skirts. Intrigued by how truly terrible Holmes' performance was in the film, I decided to checkout the documentary Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes (1999) directed by Cass Paley where the ‘King of Porn’ is revealed to be a sort of super loser and outrageous compulsive liar with psychopathic tendencies who was incapable of ever achieving a full erection and who intentionally failed to disclose to his Italian co-stars the fact that he had AIDS when he appeared in the Guido fuck flicks The Rise of the Roman Empress (1987) and The Devil in Mr. Holmes (1987), which would be the last two pornos he starred in before dying of gay cancer (it is speculated that Holmes might have contracted AIDS while starring in various gay porn flicks, including The Private Pleasures of John C. Holmes (1983) where he fucked experimental pornographer Fred Halsted's longtime boyfriend Joey Vale, who notably died of AIDS in 1986). In the Wadd doc, a number of the talking heads argue that one of Holmes’ greatest appeals to men was that he seemed like a fairly normal and unpretentious chap who did not act like a prick because he had a big dick, which does seem somewhat apparent in Prisoner of Paradise when his character does seem genuinely displeased when he is forced to fuck the ferocious Fräuleins.  As the doc also reveals, Holmes apparently completely lost interest in sex in general and refused to ejaculate unless he was getting paid for it, thus demonstrating how completely and utterly soulless his life had become. Certainly, the only captivating character in Prisoner of Paradise is Seka’s Ilsa as she genuinely seems like a sexy little Nazi bitch who gets whatever she wants (notably, Hebraic hardcore leading man Jamie Gillis once described Seka as a “white trash queen” that thought she was “a bit above porn”).  After Holmes croaked, Seka decided to get out of the porn business out of the fear that she might also contract AIDS, which is a somewhat strange thing to think about when you watch her get manhandled in the film by Johnny Wadd while she has an expression of savage ecstasy on her face.

 Somewhat ironically considering the film’s fairly tasteless depiction of the Second World War and National Socialism, there was later an award-winning documentary made entitled Prisoner of Paradise (2002) about German-Jewish actor Kurt Gerron, who was coerced into directing a Nazi propaganda film about Theresienstadt concentration camp entitled The Führer Gives the Jews a City (1944) in the hope that he and his family would be spared from a very certain death at Auschwitz. Undoubtedly, the hardcore flick is even more absurd in terms of historical accuracy than Gerron’s deluded doc (which was never released, though a 23-minute fragment survived and can easily be found online), but I guess that is what one should expect from an American porn flick that was filmed in Hawaii and that immediately concludes with an advertisement for supposed Gail Palmer flicks, including Ecstasy Express and the Chaucer reworking The Ribald Tales of Canterbury, even though the former does not exist and the latter was actually directed by porn star Hyapatia Lee’s husband Bud Lee.  It should also be noted that Holmes spent about three years living in West Germany while he was enlisted in the U.S. Army before he became a porn star, yet Prisoner of Paradise does not exploit any German that he might have learned during his stay in Krautland (though he makes a botched attempt at saying about two words in Japanese).  If you are looking for Nazisploitation oriented erotic/porn with some actual teeth, there are countless other films to choose from, including José Bénazéraf's Bordel SS (1978) aka SS Bordello, Tinto Brass' Salon Kitty (1976) and Senso '45 (2002) aka Black Angel, and Phillip Marshak's Blue Ice (1985), just to name a few.  Of course, if you ever got the urge to beat your meat to Hogan's Heroes and/or you are one of the many white American (beta)males that suffers from yellow fever, Prisoner of Paradise is probably just the film for you.

-Ty E