The Ice Pirates

Stewart Raffill (the live-action wilderness adventure movie filmmaker behind Napoleon and Samantha, Snow Tigers, The Adventures of the Wilderness Family, and Across the Great Divide) and screenwriter Stanford Sherman (Any Which Way You Can, Krull, and TV shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Batman) team up for this outrageous space comedy the plays like a hybrid of Star Wars and The Pirate Movie. The Ice Pirates is nowhere near as great a film as The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, but since that amazing movie wouldn't arrive in the theaters for five months, for a short time window, this was the best twelve-year-old boys could hope for in terms of an exciting sci-fi picture that made us laugh too!

Director Raffill's first venture into science fiction (he would also direct The Philadelphia Experiment this year) was originally going to be a $20 million project called The Water Planet. However, when screenwriter Sherman's big-budget sci-fi film Krull faired poorly at the box office, the budget was slashed to $8M, and the movie's tone took on a far more campy vibe. I saw The Ice Pirates in the theater as part of a friend’s 13th or 14th birthday party, and I loved it. However, this is not one of those movies one goes back to and continues to love for purely nostalgic reasons (at least if you're me—but the continuing affection for this movie is amazing. When The Projection Booth, a podcast I guest on every once in a while, did an episode on it, I was shocked at how effusively other guys my age who saw this as kids still love it).

The Ice Pirates is a pretty terrible picture, but it still has much going for it. For one thing, it features one of the few acting performances from Bruce Vilanch, who also did some uncredited rewriting, camping things up considerably. The cast is pretty impressive, too; Robert Urich gets to go full HanSolo, Ron Perlman plays the first of many of the tough guy genre warrior roles that would define his long career, John Carradine mugs, Ian Abercrombie minces, and Anjelica Huston is a beautiful bad-ass. This was an early role for Huston, and I always assumed it was a movie she'd like to forget, but when I read her memoir, I was surprised to find that she speaks lovingly of the film and the process of making it.

The picture's biggest flaw is that it's simply too dark. Not tonally dark, visually dark. Early-80s movies are generally far less brightly lit than movies of the past thirty years, as high-speed film stock hadn't yet come into common use, but Ice Pirates is so dark you can barely see what's going on (even on the BluRay). It's an ugly-looking movie and, for a comedy, that's a handicap. I'm convinced this would be at least 30% funnier if we could really see everything that's happening on screen well. There are a few inspired extended gags and a surprisingly satisfying action-comedy climax. Still, I feel confident that this movie is strictly for '84 fanboys who saw it as kids in '84.