The Ice Pirates (1984)

Good start, but then it gets ruined

From my favorite movies..

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

There is so much wrong with this film, make 3 years before "Space Balls". Angelica Huston probably wanted to buy up and burn all the copies! Water not oxygen is such a scarce commodity and "The Templars" have a virtual monopoly on it. The Ice Pirates are a rag-tag band of water thieves. There are the usual cliché cast members including a beautiful princess (Mary Crosby) plus a quest for the 7th planet where water exists in great abundance. Much potty humor. A "castration machine" to turn prisoners into mindless slaves. Reused sets including a recycled matte from "Logan's Run". A bodyless being with Amazonian guards. A silly space herpes monster. Robots that act like The 3 Stooges. A beheading in the Alien Pirate Bar. Minor racist comments. A cheaply-made "Mad Max" desert car chase. Simulated (just lots of moaning) sex. The cheap costumes: pirates, King Arthur chainmail, Vikings, black leather. This started out as a serious film and lost its way. Fairly decent spaceship special effects but shoddy Atari displays. A great cast totally wasted. The time travel climax is very confusing but cleverly done. All the men grow long white beards like Moses. The Space Pirates fight the Templars "to the death" with swords and lasers. The hero's baby boy grows up before our eyes and saves-the-day. Then everything returns back to normal? It's tasteless yet occasionally funny, in spite of itself! After all the new "Star Wars" films of late, we need another space spoof. The working title: "Darth Vader Go Home!"

Another one of those movies where my own 8-year-old Self and my 35-year-old Self would give it entirely different reviews. It was certainly a great movie to grow up with in the 80's and even though it's not nearly as bonkers as SPACEBALLS, I remember liking it a lot better because it's certainly a lot darker and contains a lot more tension, thrills, and suspense.8-year-old:Really fun space action movie gets off to a bang but quickly bogs down in some talky bits and lack of action and funny jokes until about halfway through (I still have no idea why that pointless and long Carradine scene was included). However right at the point when Urich asks a guard for a drink and splashes it in his face, the movie starts getting good and maintains an energy that just gets better as the film goes along. Annoying romantic subplot interrupts a lot of great space battles and robot action. The (often incompetent) robot henchmen are tremendously well-realized and provide the lion's share of the enjoyment. Good music, fun costumes, lots of fun action and effects mainly hampered by mushy stuff and jokes that flew right over my head.35-year-old:I'll agree on most of those points, only I had no idea at the time how cheap this movie looks. Some of the effects come off well for the time and it's got a good dingy ALIEN-style art direction and production design for the ship interiors. Also look out for the great cast of up- and-comers who exhibit great some chemistry together, not to mention Mary Crosby is absolutely stunning. Unfortunately most of the humor falls flat, mainly being aimed at very young teenagers, featuring a very unwelcome cameo from an irritating Bruce Villanch.However, this film certainly has an idiotic charm to it that I haven't seen a lot of movies manage quite this well. It's a goofy slapstick for fits and starts yet retains enough of a respect for its own universe to preserve a sense of gravity and pathos enough to be emotionally resonant at times. A lot of this is thanks to Bruce Broughton's excellent old fashion musical score and the strength of the performances. Robert Urich was certainly a capable and charismatic leading man who unfortunately never quite escaped TV and he shall be sorely missed.

Ice Pirates is a B-movie, it's campy, trashy and it is most of the time hilariously funny.To me it probably is the funniest sf movie I ever watched. Sure, Galaxy Quest is funny, but it is also totally selfconcious, the whole humour comes from making fun of Star Trek.Ice Pirates also makes fun of sf tropes, but it never takes itself seriously. While the story might be less strange than Buckaroo Banzai, the former is as quirky as the latter.On the other hand, some of the visuals still look great to me.This is one of the few films, I loved as a child, that stood up to the test of time and entertained the adult me as well as the young peg.

After missing out on this innumerable times on TCM UK, I decided to check it out given its sci-fi/adventure/camp pedigree: I knew I’d be in for a thoroughly silly ride – but it was also astoundingly bad! Anyway, perhaps appropriately given the characters involved, the script rips off many sci-fi titles then of recent vintage – SOYLENT GREEN (1973), ZARDOZ (1974), LOGAN’S RUN (1976; to the extent that it was filmed on some of the self-same sets!), STAR WARS (1977), ALIEN (1979) and MAD MAX 2: THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)! The plot is simple but not exactly engaging: from the title one can deduce that water has become scarce on the planet where all of this takes place – so our ragtag buccaneer heroes take it upon themselves to steal ice blocks from the tyrannical Templar(!) rulers. Also involved is a beautiful princess (Mary Crosby, daughter of Bing!) in search of her father, the deposed king; by the way, the cast includes another famous offspring: Anjelica Huston (daughter of John) as one of the pirate band – thankfully, the actress’ mistake in accepting such a role would soon be forgotten in the wake of her winning an Oscar (under her father’s guidance, no less) for PRIZZI’S HONOR (1985). Since STAR WARS had Peter Cushing as the “Supreme Commander”, the film-makers opted to have a screen legend of their own – 78-year old John Carradine (who’s seen strapped to a sort of operating table during his one brief scene!).The most notable bits (for all the wrong reasons) are: the alien using the toilet; the castration machine; the clumsy antics (including karate-style combat!) of the inevitable robot companions; the goofy slave/eunuch make-up worn at one point by the heroes; the recurring attacks by the “space herpies” (whatever that is); the climax in which the characters are made to age when going through a time-warp (Crosby becomes pregnant, gives birth, and sees her son grow up in the space of 30 seconds, while leading man Robert Urich himself is replaced by John Ford stalwart Hank Worden for this scene!) – incidentally, the jump-cuts adopted here (intending to denote the rapid passage of time) are not only unsuccessful but downright irritating.