The Ice Pirates (1984) - MGM chaos results in space nonsense

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Several merits of Stewart Raffill's The Ice Pirates are pointed out in tiny lettering on this teen-targeting poster for it

A 'space pirate' knocks out a farting alien.

 

The Ice Pirates is written by Stanford Sherman (Shalimar (1978)) and co-writer/director Stewart Raffill (The Tender Warrior (1971)).

The purple outline above gives a sense of the small and bewildering plot of The Ice Pirates, which is hard to recount as something that makes sense, (probably because it doesn't), but which also includes such elements as a factory that castrates men, an evil, fat dictator who is surrounded by women in bikinis, a beheading, (and the head then tickled under his nose with a feather.) Also a sort of sex scene with the line spoken; "It's so stiff. Your belt I mean". 

Popular sci-fi originals Mad Max (1979), Alien (1979) and Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) are here attempted copied in a haphazard way without much in the way of ideas or skills involved, and the result is the (colorful, sure, but little else) disaster that is The Ice Pirates. 

 

 

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: 9 mil. $

Box office: 14.2 mil. $ (North America alone); projected 19.2 mil. $ total gross

= Uncertain but likely a flop (projected return of 2.13 times its cost)

[The Ice Pirates was released 16 March (USA) and runs 91 minutes. It was reportedly envisioned first as a serious sci-fi movie with a 20 mil. $ budget. The indebted studio lowered this to 8 mil. $ (apparently it went over-budget by a million), and it was turned into a sci-fi comedy. Shooting took place around March 1983 in California, including in Los Angeles. The film opened #3, behind holdover hits Splash and Footloose, to a 4.3 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent one more weekend in the top 5 (#4), grossing 14.2 mil. $. Its performance in a small list of foreign markets that only counts West Germany, Spain and Australia is not listed online and may likely have been limited, perhaps to 5 mil. $, which would result in a total gross of 19.2 mil. $, which would make the film a flop. Raffill returned with The Philadelphia Experiment (1984). Robert Urich (Clover Bend (2002)) returned in 4 TV credits prior to his theatrical return in Turk 182 (1985); Mary Crosby (Queen of the Lot (2010)) in 12 TV credits prior to her theatrical return in Johann Strauss: The King Without a Crown/Johann Strauss - Der König ohne Krone (1987). The Ice Pirates is rotten at 17 % with a 4.50/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

 

What do you think of The Ice Pirates?