Exploiting the Archives: Control Nathan Rabin #98: The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak (1984)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah. All that’s left is Peckinpah’s blood-soaked war movie Cross of Iron and I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie.
I am overjoyed, as well as a little puzzled, to announce yet another patron-funded jaunt through the filmography of a cultural figure a little less distinguished than either David Bowie, easily one of the greatest and most important artists of the past century, and legendary auteur Peckinpah.
This piece marks the first in a series of articles covering in exhaustive, even perverse detail the films of Tawny Kitaen, gymnast, model, video vixen, ex-wife and muse of Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale and all-around troubled sexpot.
I was a ten year old boy at the height of Kitaen’s fame as one of MTV’s preeminent sex kittens so she occupies a place in my memory and my imagination wildly disproportionate to her cultural standing. Along with fellow MTV staple Samantha Fox, Kitaen loomed large in my pre-pubescent mind as the epitome of white-hot adult sexuality.
If you were looking for the defining iconography of the sex and sleaze-saturated hair metal movement, it would be tough, if not impossible, to beat the image of Kitaen writhing acrobatically and gymnastically on the hood of sports cars, a vision of loveliness in all white at once angelic and ferociously sexual.
I will be spending a whole lot of time with Kitaen in the upcoming year so watching the unrated director’s cut of her 1984 starring debut The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak, I was pleased to discover that the 44 year old dad version of me is every bit as besotted by the actress’ dewy, sensual charms as my ten year old self was.
I am a fan of Kitaen. In Gwendoline, a softcore romp loosely inspired by the French bondage comic strip of the same, the hair metal icon embodies the same combination of wide-eyed, virginal innocence and smoldering sexuality as Jane Fonda in Barbarella, Ewa Aulin in Candy and Bo Derek in Tarzan, The Ape Man. In what could have been a star-making turn in a world even sleazier than our own, Kitaen offers a charming, tongue-in-cheek burlesque of coquettish flirtatiousness.
Gwendoline resembles Tarzan, The Ape Man so strongly that my fuzzy memory has more or less combined the two movies into one horny, soft-core colonialist romp but if I might give Gwendoline director and co-writer Just Jaeckin the faintest of praise, he is a better filmmaker than Tarzan, the Ape Man auteur John Derek. Then again, that is true of pretty much every other filmmaker in history, including Neil Breen and Tommy Wiseau.
In 10, Bo Derek exploded off the screen. She radiated charisma and sensuality. She was a goddamn natural movie star. At least that’s what you’d think if you only saw 10. In the films she made with her late husband, however, she was an empty, vacuous, inert onscreen presence who seemingly had no business whatsoever starring in movies.
Gwendoline is no 10 of course but as a vehicle for Kitaen it does exactly what it sets out to do: give horny dudes boners. And ladies lady boners as well. Jaeckin began as a photographer before segueing into feature films as the auteur behind such notorious pornographic opuses as the original Emmanuelle, The Story of O and Cannon’s adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
As a filmmaker, Jaeckin was primarily interested in helping facilitate masturbation but The Perils of Gwendoline is more ambitious and less explicitly pornographic than the movies that made his name as a pervert of note. It’s part of an Indiana Jones-fueled boom in old-fashioned, serial-inspired adventures romps based on intellectual properties that pre-dated Steven Spielberg’s blockbusters, like King Solomon’s Mines and its sequel, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.
Like Raiders of the Lost Ark and its many imitators, Gwendoline is a casually racist imperialist fantasy about gorgeous white people seeking fortune and adventure in foreign lands filled with sweaty, evil, crudely caricatured foreigners with ominous intent.
There are no subtitles in The Perils of Gwendoline. We never know what any of the non-English speaking characters are saying because, in the filmmakers’ minds at least, it does not matter, as it’s invariably something evil and nefarious.
We open in China, where ripe, virginal good girl Gwendoline (Kitaen) has ventured with her maid/sidekick Beth (Zabou Breitman, whose vibe is “Sexy Amelie” and/or “Foxy Olive Oyl) in search of her father, who went missing looking for a rare butterfly that would make his name as a lepidopterist. Gwendoline is about to be sexually violated by a brothel owner when she is saved by adventurer/mercenary Willard (Brent Huff). He’s the movie’s idea of a real man, a sneering cynic who kills without hesitation or reservation, as naturally and reflexively as breathing.
Willard whips Gwendoline into an erotic frenzy by killing her tormentors. She spends much of the film’s first act seemingly on the verge of an overpowering orgasm brought upon by Willard’s manly presence.
Naive but strong-willed Gwendoline falls into an instant state of love and lust for Willard. The worse the film’s off-brand Indiana Jones treats her, the more she hungers for him sexually. Willard treats our heroine like total garbage, which only makes her want him more.
“Feelings are for creeps!” Willard barks at Gwendoline when she makes fuck-me eyes at him but by the end of the film he’s catching feelings himself after she saves him almost as often as he saves her.
Our heroes eventually get captured by an otherworldly tribe. Gwendoline does not want to die a virgin so, in a scene of genuine eroticism, Willard brings her to a state of blinding ecstasy without their bodies even touching, just by describing the things that he will do to her when he can.
The heroically caucasian trio eventually escapes but ends up in underground lair that is the home of the Pikaho, an all-female tribe whose members dress like futuristic sex gladiators and are abused in elaborate torture devices if they attempt to mate with men.
At this point The Perils of Gwendoline veers deliriously into a crazy fusion of retro, futuristic and sadomasochistic, as it trades in the racism and xenophobia of its first act for sexism and homophobia.
Willard, the manliest man in the history of manly men, attempts to go undercover as a woman but ends up in the same precarious position as every man doomed to spend time with the Pikaho: in order for the tribe to have a future, it needs men to impregnate members of the tribe but the men are invariably killed as soon as they have served their purpose.
As her gyrating in Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” indelibly illustrates, Kitaen is an obscenely flexible, long-limbed gymnast in addition to being a world-class beauty so she ends up defeating all of her rivals for the prize of having sex with Willard.
The Pikaho are killed in a volcanic eruption and sweet, sweet Gwendoline and her beau succeed in finding the butterfly her father spent his life searching for.
Like its heroine, The Perils of Gwendoline is at once unrelentingly horny and prurient yet graced with an incongruous innocence. Re-watching I experienced a weird sort of quadruple nostalgia. I was nostalgic for the serials of the 1930s and 40s and the newfangled blockbusters they inspired but I was also nostalgic for the time in my life and career when I first watched it and my time and my long-ago stint as a video store clerk, when the movie’s video box was a source of morbid, voyeuristic fascination.
I watched and wrote about the abbreviated American cut of this movie sixteen years ago for an AV Club column called Films That Time Forgot so I can assure you that the extended version, with nearly twenty more minutes of oversexed nonsense is a more satisfying cinematic experience.
The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak is pure pulp, pure sleaze, a randy romp that aspires to do nothing more than provide some sordid thrills and a whole lot of titillation. It succeeds largely because its aspirations are so modest and its mind so deliciously dirty.
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