The Ice Pirates (1984)

Directed by: Stuart Raffill

Writers: Stuart Raffill, Stanford Sherman

Some movies are hard to describe, because their quality doesn’t lie in any particular segment that you can analyze, measure and put on paper (or screen). If I had to describe why this movie, without a shadow of a doubt, absolutely rules, I’d simply say – it has SOUL. And if that’s not enough for you, then go watch Lars von Trier or something and leave me alone.

Okay, let me elaborate this just a little bit: The Ice Pirates is a wacky space adventure with enormous quantity of... stuff. Stuff that happens, I mean. You have people dressed as pirates, swordfighting (for no apparent reason, powerful futuristic weapons are rarely used!), cheap sex jokes (so cheap, in fact, that they work), talking severed head, a frog woman, main music theme that’s an obvious rip-off of the Star Trek theme, Mad Max-like desert car chases, random alien parasites, unicorns, eunuchs, Templars, politically incorrect (without being offensive!) racial jokes that you’d never see in a today’s movie etc. etc. etc.

Of course, all this would have been a horrible mess if it weren’t for the glue to, well, glue it all together. And in this case, I’d say that glue are the surprisingly likeable characters, especially the main hero (Mel Brooks, take note!), played by Robert Urich, who really nails it down. He reminds me of John Terlesky in Jim Wynorski’s Deathstalker II, or, if you want a more mainstream comparison – Bruce Campbell’s Ash from the Evil Dead series. Take for example an otherwise amazing film like Spaceballs, being slightly less amazing than it could have been, due to Bill Pullman’s uninspired performance. Exactly the opposite happens here.

The main hero’s space crew is also great and it includes Anjelica Huston and Ron Perlman. So it’s really great to watch this characters going from one adventure into another, being completely aware of the tongue-in-cheek nature of the film. Although its inspirations are obvious (Star Trek, Star Wars, old pirate movies, to name a few), The Ice Pirates is not a direct parody of any particular movie or genre. It doesn’t try to pack jokes into every single frame, it lets itself breathe (so to speak) so it will never make you tired – and when something works (and that’s very often), it really does WORK!

 

My favorites here are the running joke with malfunctioning robots and an absolutely hilarious fight sequence near the end, where everyone ages rapidly during some weird time-space phenomenon. I allmost fell on the floor laughing during this one. Add to all this the special effects and set design that are way above the movie’s low budget and you have a clear winner. I know tastes are different, but if you don’t like The Ice Pirates, something is wrong with you and you need to see a psychiatrist.