Our latest film opens with a Lucas Scroll and a redundant narrator, who both reveal that even though the Galactic Wars have ended, most water bearing planets were obliterated by the same. Thus, with only one source of consumable H2O left in the entire galaxy, the evil Templars, who control the planet Mithra and its rare water flow, hold the rest of the known universe under a very wet thumb.
But! This tyrannical monopoly is constantly under siege by roving bands of rebellious space pirates, who ambush Mithroid convoys and pillage their frozen cargo of precious ice. And speaking of such devils, with that opening plot dump safely tucked away, our movie proper then begins with one such pirate ship zigzagging its way through a convoy of Templar Ice-Freighters until it finally latches onto one undetected.
Ensconced inside, Jason (Urich), the roguish captain of this outlaw vessel, rallies a boarding party, augmented by several cantankerous robots, who punch their way through the hull. Now, even though Roscoe (Roberts), Jason's first mate and chief engineer, swears these robots are all top-of-the-line, all visual evidence suggests that Asimov's Laws of Robotics have been chucked out the airlock with prejudice as these ever-malfunctioning automatons don't obey orders very well and appear to be constantly on the verge of falling apart or running away.
Anyhoo, after a successful breach, our film shows its low-balling comedy hand early as the pirates have managed to tap their way into the enemy ship’s toilet, complete with a rubbery E.T., pants down around his geeblars, trying to pinch one off. Nice.
Then, in their efforts to avoid a passing sentry patrol, the pirates inadvertently stumble into the quarters of Princess Karina (Crosby), currently in sleep stasis. And after subduing her Nanny (Core), over the protests of everyone else, Jason, thinking with that slight bulge in his pants, wants to kidnap the princess and hold her for ransom. But, they've tallied too long and the alarm has been raised, ending these deliberations.
Thus and so, with the stolen ice and a pilfered princess in tow, accompanied by some of the best robot-carnage ever committed to film, the pirates make it back to their vessel and blast off just as the Templar Gun-Ships come into range.
Hopelessly outgunned, Jason gives the order to split-up for a better chance to escape and rendezvous later back on Zagora, the Pirate Moon. With that, the modular ship breaks into three component pods and scatters. But while the others escape, Jason and Roscoe aren't so lucky as they are shot down and captured by Lord Paisley (Caillou), who liberates Karina and sentences our heroes to become slaves of the Empire.
And did I mention that before becoming a Templar slave one must first be processed, castrated and lobotomized? It's true. Luckily for Jason and Roscoe, Karina has other plans for them and *ahem* saves the ‘Captain's Log’ from this dire fate. But, there's a price:
Seems Karina needs Jason and his pirate crew to help find her father, whom, she alleges, finally found the legendary Seventh World, a lost planet, somewhere near the center of the galaxy; which, if you were paying attention during that opening scroll, is rumored to have an almost unlimited supply of water.
Of course whether this mythical hydrated planet actually exists or not, obviously Lord Paisley and the Templars would rather keep this discovery a secret at all costs, making our merry marauding band of Ice Pirates the most wanted fugitives in all six systems, dead or alive -- but preferably dead…
You wanna know something? I will never, ever understand the fathomless depths of hate for this movie amongst my niche of B-Movie Brethren. To even invoke its name brings swift sanction and censure. Feh. Heathens. Hell, even outside my circle The Ice Pirates (1984) takes way too much grief for being just another badly Xeroxed Star Wars (1977) rip-off -- or in this case, coming out in 1984, a riding on the tail of Return of the Jedi (1983) cash-in from 20th Century Fox's rival studio, MGM.
This all started with Standford Sherman, who cooked up a treatment for something he called The Water Planet; a sci-fi epic of solid H20 and space pirates. Now, Sherman's writing credits date back to the old Batman TV-series (1966-1968), including Yvonne Craig’s inaugural appearance as Barbara Gordon and Batgirl in Enter Batgirl, Exit Penguin (Season 3, Episode 1). This would probably go a long way in explaining why his latest script's slapstick tongue was so firmly planted in its cornball cheek -- and I freely admit that this bawdy goof of a film nearly bites this muscle in half in a few spots.
Sherman had also penned the previous year's sci-fi / fantasy epic, Krull (1983), which also involved a lot of questing and meandering as it sputtered along with every known British character actor filling out the cast of adventurers. And as originally conceived, The Water Planet was of the same tone -- only set in outer space this time.
Now, despite developing a strong cult following (eventually), Krull had kinda fizzled for Columbia when first released, barely making back half of its production costs. On Sneak Previews, critic Roger Ebert called it "One of the most boring, nonsensical, illogical fantasies [he’d] seen in a long time." I once saw it at B-Fest where they showed the reels completely out of order that, honestly, improved the Krull experience even though I liked that film well enough already despite its lethargic pace.
Thus, Sherman looked elsewhere and sold The Water Planet script to an eager MGM and David Begelman, the head of production, who were in desperate need of a hit. Begelman then assigned the project to producer John Foreman, whose career arc went from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), to The Man Who Would Be King (1975), to this film, to Mannequin 2: On the Move (1991), with the budget originally set at somewhere in-between $15 and $20 million to pull it off, depending on the source.
Here, the production ran into its first snag. See, as I said, MGM was floundering rather badly at the time, and had been for nearly two decades -- some would argue even longer than that, saying the studio had been in a creative and financial rut since the end of World War II. And things had gotten so bad that by the time The Water Planet rolled around the studio financiers were forced to hand down an edict, decreeing a maximum budget-limit of $8 million on all productions, effective immediately. (In contrast, Krull cost Columbia over $30 million -- and some estimates go as high as $50 million.) Thus and so, to bring it in that cheaply, Foreman turned to Stewart Raffill, hoping he could salvage things and pull the film off at half the price.
Now, Raffill stood 6-feet and seven inches, who had immigrated from England in the mid-1960s and landed his first job in Hollywood training and renting out his menagerie of exotic animals, including lions, tigers, elephants, chimpanzees and bears, to both feature films -- Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966), Monkeys, Go Home! (1967), and TV-productions like the Ron Ely Tarzan series (1966-1968), where he also handled some stunt-work, doubling for the lead actor.
And while hanging around the sets, Raffill absorbed everything he could about the nuts and bolts of film production, which eventually led him to the Okefenokee Swamp for his first independent feature, The Tender Warrior (1971), where a young boy and his pet chimp sabotage the traps and free the animals caught by a bunch of degenerate moonshiners, which he wrote, produced and directed at the ripe old age of 22. Once completed, Raffill sold the film to Warner Bros., who then sat on it for so long he bought it back and just four-walled it with regional entrepreneur William Thompson -- Red Hot Shot (1970), The Bus is Coming (1971).
The burgeoning auteur then sold his next script to Walt Disney Studios. Based loosely on one of his pet lions, Major, whom Raffill used to walk down Hollywood Boulevard on a chain to try and drum-up business, Disney turned this into Napoleon and Samantha (1972), starring Jodi Foster, Johnny Whitaker, Michael Douglas and Zamba the lion. More family fare followed when Raffill wrote and directed The Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1975) and The Sea Gypsies (1978). He would also lend part of his private zoo to Noel Marshall and Tippi Hedren for the totally bonkers Roar (1981), where a family shares a house with dozens and dozens of big cats. Mayhem and ah-lot of stitches ensue.
Raffill then stretched his legs a bit with High Risk (1981), an overlooked gem of a heist film, where a group of laid-off auto-workers pool their unemployment for some Soldier of Fortune shenanigans south of the border that, I think, culminates with the best 'oh shit' stinger since The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). I cannot recommend this one hard enough, fellow programs. A stellar cast with James Brolin, Bruce Davison, Cleavon Little and Chick Vennera as the in over-their-heads crew, James Coburn as the Colombian drug czar, Ernest Borgnine as the gun runner, Anthony Quinn as a hypochondriac bandit general, and Lindsay Wagner hysterically playing way-off type as a fellow prisoner busted for pot possession.
I believe it was the humor-infused action on High Risk’s minimal budget that officially got Raffill on Foreman’s radar to try and shore-up The Water Planet. Raffill agreed on the condition that he could rewrite the film and make it an out-right comedy to better fit the money they had to spend. As he told Brian Lowry during an interview for Starlog Magazine (May, 1984), “I decided it would be advisable to exploit the comedic aspects of outer space and its humor, as opposed to the hardware and sci-fi technology, because a) we didn’t have the budget, and b) because that’s something which really hadn’t been done yet.”
Added Foreman in the same Starlog interview, “Effects pictures have become top-heavy. In many sci-fi films, the technology tends to rob the movie of the story’s personal side.” Thus, his producer eagerly agreed with Raffill’s pitch and he signed on to tackle what was now being marketed as The Ice Pirates -- a decision Raffill would later regret, saying in an interview for the Bristol Bad Film Club (May 12, 2018), “When you work in the studio system, you have to please so many people. It’s like every dog has to piss on the lamp post. It takes a year just so everyone can say they contributed.”
And then, after nearly 18-months of pre-production and shooting on kit-bashed sets held together with spit and bailing wire, the film ran into another major snag as another seismic shift hit MGM's front office when Kirk Kerkorian, the head of the studio, hired Frank Yablans to replace Begelman in an effort to stop the bleeding.
When he was in charge at Paramount in the 1970s, Yablans oversaw the marketing and production of Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), and Chinatown (1974). Despite these successes, he resigned not long after when Paramount went through its own regime change. As an independent producer, he was the first to team up Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor for the comedy Silver Streak (1976), and handled The Other Side of Midnight (1977) for 20th Century Fox, which the studio felt was their sure fire hit for 1977 and not the sci-fi disaster Alan Ladd Jr. had backed for George Lucas. And one of the last films he produced before being recruited by Kerkorian was the polarizing Mommie Dearest (1981), based on Christina Crawford’s tell-all book about her allegedly abusive mother, Joan Crawford, and her neurosis over wire hangers.
Under Yablans, MGM merged with United Artists and officially became MGM/UA in hopes it would reduce costs and eliminate overhead in the front office. But the studio was still hemorrhaging an obscene amount of money as it stumbled along (-- there were even accusations that some of that disappearing money was being embezzled by their new production chief), with Yablans leaving in 1986 when Ted Turner took over. But before that, Yablans did his best to cut costs wherever he could -- and one of the productions he really brought the hammer down on was The Ice Pirates.
“MGM brought in a new guy, and he was a problematic sort of a fellow," Raffill said in an interview with Blake Harris for Film (July 15, 2016). "And he had a bad time with John Foreman so he tried to sabotage the film. Pulled the money out on them, but we did finish it.”
Raffill expanded further on this turbulent finish in the Lowry interview, saying, "A change in studio management is like a purge. It's what I call 'the White House phenomenon. ' When the studio head changes -- just like when the Carter regime left the White House -- everybody leaves with him, and the new guy replaces everyone. That's what happens with the studios. Problems occur if you're making a film during that changeover, which is what happened with The Ice Pirates.”
Now, Yablans’ beef with Foreman was personal. Seems Foreman was a good friend of actor Paul Newman. And when Yablans said something rather derogatory about Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward, Foreman apparently decked him. “He hated our producer and tried to cancel the whole movie after we’d spent 18-months putting it together,” said Raffill. “We’d hired people and were building sets, so I went to the producer to find out what the problem was.” And the only reason Yablans didn’t shelf the movie as a tax write-off was because so much money had already been spent on it. Thus, he allowed them to finish it but they had to be finished as quickly and as cheaply as possible, giving Raffill only one week to do the final mix before the film was dumped into theaters in early March, 1984, instead of an intended summer release. And while The Ice Pirates did manage to turn a profit, it didn't exactly light the box-office on fire. In fact, the reaction was, forgive me, ice cold.
Early concept poster art, complete with lost Y-Wing fighter.
"The Ice Pirates is one of those movie pictures that makes you think sitting in on the story conference might be a lot more interesting than watching the finished film," said critic John McClintock (The Peninsula Times Tribune, March 25, 1984). "Imagine the mental gymnastics scriptwriters Stewart Raffill and Standford Sherman must have gone through to come up with this intensely 'commercial' amalgamation of Star Wars, Alien (1979) and Porky's (1981). It's the kind of movie which is vulgar without being 'adult' -- so stupid it's often hard to believe it was written by grown-ups."
I guess if you add-up all those tumultuous elements -- the corner-cutting, the tonally inconsistent script, and the cheapjack FX, one can understand why people tend to throw rocks at the end results. Still, under Raffill’s guidance The Ice Pirates never slows down and kept right on trucking -- warping? -- along, which tends to bowl over all the groan-inducing bits. But at the same stroke, this doesn’t allow the actual good parts much time to shine either.
But, eh, the cast of mostly TV-vets are fine and appear to happily run with it. (In fact, the whole thing feels like a backdoor TV-pilot.) In the lull between Vega$ (1978-1981) and Spenser for Hire (1985-1988), Robert Urich makes a fine scoundrel.
Several unconfirmed sources claim Kevin Costner was offered the role of Jason first, who was destined to break out one year later in Silverado (1985). But I have two confirmed sources that say Urich was under contract at MGM for a feature and the studio brass decided this was it from the beginning. Urich also did most of his own stunts, which was another cost saving measure for Raffill; simplifying things down to the barest minimum, action wise, who later claimed his cast did 95% of their own stunts on the film.
Meantime, Michael D. Roberts, on the heels of his similar second-banana role in Manimal (1983), is fine as the comedy relief -- helped immensely by those robots, which we’ll be addressing in a sec. And Mary Crosby, known forever as the girl who shot J.R. Ewing on Dallas (1978-1991), has some bite as Karina, easily matching and countering Jason's every move.
In other supporting roles we find the always reliable Ron Perlman and, strangely enough, Anjelica Huston, whom you’d think would be completely out of place in this nonsense; but she kicks some major ass as Maida. Also adding some muscle are former NFLer John Matuzak and the Pimpbot 5000, who help our heroes get off Mithra and back to Zagora, where several leads await Karina that will, hopefully, reveal the whereabouts of her missing father.
However, even if they do find him, and he confirms the Seventh World's existence, there are still no guarantees they'll reach it. You see, many other expeditions have tried to find this fabled water planet and everyone of them failed, catastrophically, due to a massive acceleration hiccup in the space-time continuum that surrounds the center of the galaxy, like a bubble, explaining why the crews who managed to make it back out of this distortion in their crumbling starships were radically aged and decrepit -- or dead.
But, never fear. For even though Jason and Roscoe accidentally infect their ship with a case of Space Herpes (-- Venereal Odiousus Comici Propsus, and way too long of a story to tell here), they manage to find Karina's father in the care of prissy Prince Wendon (Villanch) and his robot Glamazons. Alas, this was all a ruse and a trap. That’s the bad news. The good news, he really did find the Seventh Planet and has secretly left his daughter the means to navigate safely through the time-warp, which is what the Templars were after all along.
And so, with Lord Paisley in hot pursuit, we reach the inspired climactic battle; a work of sheer genius as the combatants are caught in that accelerated time-loop, aging, and graying, and gestating (trust me), and creaking, and shriveling-up with each passing second, that the written word … just cannot give due justice to it. Sorry. You'll have to tune-in and see for yourselves how our heroes manage to eke out a victory with help from a most unexpected source.
Despite the obvious sci-fi trappings, The Ice Pirates honestly owes more to the old pirate movies of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, with special nods to Captain Blood (1935) and, especially, The Crimson Pirate (1952) -- a fanciful send-up of the genre starring Burt Lancaster and Eva Bartok. "We watched pirate movies,” Raffill told Lowry. Adding wryly, “We didn’t watch Star Wars. We couldn't afford to try and duplicate Star Wars. And besides, [they’ve] already duplicated [themselves] a few times." Even Bruce Broughton's rousing musical score is more Errol Flynn than Darth Vader. "We used the pirate characters because they're bold and connected to certain familiar mannerisms and attitudes," Raffill explained. "The audience can easily pick up that they're pirates who have certain Errol Flynn-ish 'naughty boy' qualities.”
I don’t think I’m giving too much away when it's revealed the confirmed Seventh Planet was really Earth all along. And while this is only implied, originally the final shot of the film was to be the pirate ship doing a flyby over Malibu Beach to the gathered crowd’s astonishment. But this was cut by Yablans before the film was released, much to the director’s surprise. “The studio head cut that out! He never told me and it was gone,” said Raffill. “I had to drink a lot of vodka to calm myself down.”
Beyond that there weren’t too many hard feelings on Raffill’s part over the constant studio politicking and dickering on The Ice Pirates, chalking it up to ‘that’s just how things worked in Hollywood.’ And he was soon back at it for John Carpenter and New World Pictures with The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), which was based on the notorious Top-Secret Naval experiment that went awry, allegedly, which we go into some detail in our review of The Bermuda Triangle (1979).
Raffill followed that up with the mind-blowingly gawdawful, albeit hilarious, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) knock-off, Mac & Me (1988), and then teamed up with Foreman again for Mannequin 2: On the Move, before crashing and burning with the tale of an animatronic dinosaur with the implanted brain of a dead teenager, his sexy girlfriend, and their quest to find a new host body, Tammy and the T-Rex (1994), which is probably another gonzo tale for another day.
And so, circling back to The Ice Pirates, to help keep costs down most of the futuristic sets and props were pilfered wholesale from Logan's Run (1976) -- a lucky bonus from the United Artist merger. Aside from them, the special-effects are pretty standard for the time of production: matte lines, stock sound-effect lasers, and model spaceships -- that bank around rather oddly. FX artist Max Anderson was brought in early to establish what was “available and financially feasible” during the initial script rewrite. Anderson had pitched in on the visual effects for Meteor (1979), Airplane! (1980), Altered States (1980) and JAWS 3-D (1983), and would serve as the VFX supervisor on The Ice Pirates, whose suggestions always kept the script in flux.
And when filming started, the script kept right on adjusting. "We had a set blow away in the desert," Raffill recalled -- I believe he’s referring to the scenes where the film ventures into Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior (1981) territory for a spell, where our heroes must flee a marauding band of mutants in a giant battlewagon. "The day we arrived, the whole set had been blown about two miles across the desert floor. So, I just rewrote the sequence and the background became this devastated set."
Everything else was pretty much designed for a quick laugh: the Templar toilet; a nice booger-picking alien scene; a plucked space parrot; but they're mostly there to clutter up the background -- except for that Space Herpe; another by-product of the 1980s, where sexually transmitted diseases, along with casual drug use and bare boobies, were the epitome of high comedy.
"We got lots of high-tech parts from car engines and gearings and poured molds out of them,” said Raffill. “We didn't want to be sleek and spaceship-like, but rather a kind of super-funky, steam engine high-tech, with pistons and gearing -- a real hodgepodge. The idea was that these space pirates didn't have good equipment, and had to make do with whatever they could find."
Hats off to Michael Shane McCracken, Michael John McCracken and Ray Raymond for the robot designs, and to Gary Brockette for the fight choreography during the chaotic robot carnage. Like with everything else, these robots were played for cheap laughs. But when one of those jittery combat robots literally crapped its pants -- jettisoning a stream of oil, bolts, and washers out of its tin-can, before going into battle, and then the next robot in line slipped and fell on the resultant, soiled oil-slick, I nearly crapped MY pants from laughing too hard.
So, there ya go: booger-picking aliens, Space Herpes, and a robot that poops its pants. If that ain't enough of a ringing endorsement for The Ice Pirates, then what are we even doing here?
Originally posted on April 24, 2012, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.
The Ice Pirates (1984) JF Productions :: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / P: John Foreman / AP: Dennis Lasker / D: Stewart Raffill / W: Stewart Raffill, Stanford Sherman / C: Matthew F. Leonetti / E: Tom Walls / M: Bruce Broughton / S: Robert Urich, Mary Crosby, Michael D. Roberts, Anjelica Huston, John Matuszak, Ron Perlman, Natalie Core, Alan Caillou, Bruce Vilanch
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