Romance Pirata

Arrgh me hearties, this is an OK movie about singing & dancing pirates.

The film keeps a fine pace when it involves the pirates, but struggles to keep an interest when there no salty old seadogs involved in the scene.

Ted Hamilton as the Pirate King, provides a performance that is reminiscent of Errol Flynn at his peak.

Most of the outdoor scenes were filmed at Werribee Mansion, a site that is one of the most commonly used in Australian TV & film.

Arrgh I give this little piccy 5/10, a good film for the youngens. Arrgh.

My parents taped this movie off the TV when I was about 7 years old. We still had the Beta machine back then. I loved this movie and I watched it over and over and over again. I would watch it, rewind it and play it again until my family got so sick of it, they would come in and turn it off on me. I had it practically memorized, but after we got the VHS, I couldn't watch it anymore and I was so disappointed. I meant to transfer it onto a VHS, but I never have. I always thought it was a made-for-TV movie until I found it on this site. After I found it here, I immediately went and ordered the DVD because I was so excited. I'm not sure why it appealed to me so much as a kid, but I loved the corny jokes and the music was very catchy and upbeat. My brothers and I still break into a chorus of Tarantara every once in a while. Plus the movie has a little bit of everything - comedy, romance, adventure, drama. The reason I gave it an 8 rather than a 10 is because some parts of the movie are a little too cheesy, particularly the underwater scene.

That this film gets bombed the way it does angers me. The slamming it's gotten is just unwarranted! I like it a lot- it's a musical farce, so why SHOULDN'T it contain parody lyrics of the great Gilbert and Sullivan? The same people who hate it for that reason are very likely the sort of people who bust a gut laughing at the parody lyrics of musicals as penned in MAD Magazine™ by Frank Jacobs. What's the difference so long as it entertains?

I hate the fact that this did so poorly at the box office and impacted lovely Kristy McNichol's and gorgeous Chris Atkins's careers as negatively as it did. I think it was an excellent film for what it set out to do! It simply was too good a film to be trashed and ignored as it was!

This is one of the movies that still stands out as the perfect example of the movies that was the eighties. It was wonderful and it is still as fun now as it was so many years ago. It's greatest testament is time; how long and how well it has endured. There will always be people (cynics from the 90's) that only measure a movie by the dollars and cents that it made in a certain time span. This movie is over twenty years old and still is that good. The academy awards gave 'million dollar baby' an academy award for best picture; let's see how good it endures twenty years from now! Political correctness is not necessarily that main test of how good a movie is. Like Ghostbusters and Goonies, a must see for movie enthusiasts who LOVED the eighties as much as I and many others do, that want to be entertained by movies and not judge a movie simply on how much dollars a certain movie makes or its political correctness.

I have always found this to be a terribly under-rated film. Okay, so it isn't exactly true to Gilbert & Sullivan. So what? I love Gilbert and Sullivan, but this is obviously supposed to be a take-off and spoof, much like Scary Movie is a take-off and spoof. Nonetheless, I find this to be a wonderfully entertaining movie. It is extremely funny, it is filmed beautifully on location in Australia, and it has great music. Christopher Atkins and Kristy McNichol are wonderful in this film. I sure wish the studio would get around to re-releasing this film on DVD, and re-releasing the soundtrack on CD. It has been overlooked for far too long. I know many other people, who like me, simply love this film.