Part of my fondness for the 80s is nostalgia for a time when Star Wars was important and interesting enough to be ripped-off constantly.
Low-budget extravaganzas all hopped-up on lasers and robots and spaceships were just as much a part of the time as feathered-hair and synthesizers. You could probably write a book about the shameless offspring of Star Wars that came out in the 70s and 80s. Someone probably HAS written a book about it. (Let me know; I’d like to read it.)
Also, The Ice Pirates deserves several pages in it. By 1984 all of this junk was just funny, so that’s where this film goes. While Battle Beyond the Stars offered a faint smirk beneath its likable idiocy, this goofball Robert Urich vehicle goes all out into total farce.
It’s not perfect, but it’s better than Spaceballs.
Urich’s smuggler runs on the Han Solo template. He’s a charismatic cosmic crook in a galaxy where water is the most valuable thing around. The rich hoard it and Urich, and his ragtag band of wisecrackers and malfunctioning robots, steals it. He will also kidnap a princess when she’s pretty and he thinks he can get a good ransom for her.
The twist comes when it turns out that the princess’s father is missing and she thinks that Urich, being the supreme man of action that he is, might be the one who can find him.
And the adventure begins!
The best gag is the climatic trek through a time warp in which everyone rapidly ages. Urich has sex with the princess. She’s pregnant mere moments later. Then the kid is born and all grown up in a few minutes, right in the middle of a big fight scene. It’s clever!
I enjoyed the humor throughout this. It’s nice and dirty. It survives the decades well. There’s a whole pocketful of gags centered around the idea of male castration. Then there’s Bruce Vilanch’s army of bikini-clad warrior women. When this film came out, there was no PG-13 rating yet, and the power of MGM kept this from an R-rating.
So, PG it was!
Our friends at the MPAA determined that a kid could see these naughty, sex-crazed jokes if they had parental guidance.
Me though, I don’t remember my parents guiding me through shit in the 80s. They just plopped me in front of a TV with some Dr. Pepper and some Skittles. And I watched movies like The Ice Pirates and from that unholy mixture emerged the creature that stands before you today.
Director/co-writer Stewart Raffill scored some early hits with all-ages fare such as The Adventures of the Wilderness Family and Across the Great Divide. Somewhere along the way, he figured out that he was more of a B-movie kinda guy and, after this, he helmed the likes of Mac and Me, Mannequin Two: On the Move and Tammy and the T. Rex.