Directed by: Gerard Damiano
Stars: Britt Morgan, Randy West, Sharon Kane, Mike Horner, Jesse Eastern, Holly Daze, Kassi Nova
Language: English
Country: Usa | Imdb Info
Description: Poor Paula Peril is in trouble. Her family’s humble bean farm is under threat, and the villainous Dan Dastardly is ready to foreclose unless the money appears fast. The setup is pure old-fashioned melodrama: innocent heroine, wicked landlord, family crisis, impossible deadline, and plenty of exaggerated “oh, woe is me” theatrical panic.
But this is Gerard Damiano’s late-80s adult-comedy version of that tradition, so the rescue plan is anything but conventional.
Determined to save the farm, Paula heads into town and finds work at Miss Lotta’s establishment, a lively house of pleasure where performance, farce, and desperation all blur together. Paula quickly becomes the center of attention, turning her charm, nerve, and comic innocence into the family’s only real chance of raising the mortgage money.
Meanwhile, Dan Dastardly continues scheming from the sidelines, chewing the scenery like a silent-era villain who wandered into a VHS adult comedy. Paula’s would-be hero Jack Jolly faces temptations of his own, Miss Lotta keeps the business moving, and even Pops Peril tries to contribute to the family rescue in his own ridiculous way.
The Perils of Paula plays like a dirty-minded parody of vintage cliffhanger melodramas, replacing tied-to-the-tracks suspense with bedroom farce, exaggerated villainy, and broad comic performance. Its pleasure is less in realism than in theatrical nonsense: fake innocence, mock tragedy, pun-heavy character names, and an old-timey rescue plot filtered through late adult-video absurdity.
Legacy Note:
Directed, written, produced, and edited by Gerard Damiano, The Perils of Paula is a curious late-career detour from the filmmaker best known for far more historically significant adult features. Here, Damiano works in a deliberately silly register, parodying silent melodrama and rural rescue stories through the conventions of 1980s adult comedy.
Britt Morgan plays Paula as a comic innocent caught between family duty and farcical opportunity, while Mike Horner gives Dan Dastardly the broad, mustache-twirling energy the material demands. Sharon Kane as Miss Lotta and Randy West as Jack Jolly round out the cartoonish world of farms, villains, brothels, and impossible solutions.
For collectors, the film is valuable less as a major Damiano statement than as an odd VHS-era artifact: a playful adult spoof built around theatrical melodrama, farm foreclosure stakes, and deliberately ridiculous character names. It shows how, by the late 1980s, adult features could still borrow from older movie traditions — silent serials, vaudeville villains, Depression-era farm melodrama — and twist them into low-budget, self-aware parody.
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