The Ice Pirates

While I admit for a 9 year-old boy the tongue-in-cheek space adventure about a motley crew of smugglers stealing the universe's most valuable resource (water) was a hell of a lot of fun, it's equally hard to ignore as an adult that The Ice Pirates is a mess of a movie. The PG-rated movie offered funny castration jokes, space herpes, odd robots and aliens, and a time-displaced climactic battle. It also offered bad writing, cheesy special effects, and nearly as many groans as laughs.

Re-relased on Blu-ray the misadventures of Princess Karina (Mary Crosby), Jason (Robert Urich), and his crew (Michael D. Roberts, Anjelica Huston, Ron Perlman, John Matuszak) are collected here with scant extras. Those who fondly remember the film from their childhoods are likely to enjoy Ice Pirates far more than new viewers. Freely admitting that the film is the perfect definition of a B-movie, I will say there still is fun (some of it even intentional) to be had even thirty years later.

[Warner Archive Collection, $21.99]