Trailer
Plot summary
Mabel Stanley is a bookish American teenager and exchange student in a seaside Australian town. At a local pirate festival she watches a swordplay demonstration led by Chris, a young American instructor, who invites her out on his boat. Her exchange sisters Edith, Kate and Isabel keep her from boarding, so she hires a small sailboat and gives chase. A storm throws her overboard and she comes ashore on a beach, where she dreams an adventure set a century earlier. There Chris is Frederic, apprentice to the pirates of Penzance, who celebrates his twenty-first birthday aboard their ship and declines the Pirate King's invitation to sign on as a full pirate. Adrift, he swims ashore to Mabel and her sisters and proposes to her, but local custom says the elder sisters must marry first.
Cast
- Marc Colombanias Dwarf Pirate
- Linda Nagleas Aphrodite
- Cathrine Lynchas Isabel
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Pirate Movie (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The production first hired young director Richard Franklin, and rehearsals began in August 1981 with shooting planned for September, but Kristy McNichol, who had final script approval, clashed with Franklin over his vision for the film and he suddenly left the production.
- Screenwriter Trevor Farrant was paid $55,000 for the script, reportedly the highest fee any Australian screenwriter had earned to that point, and he claimed he wrote the entire thing in just four days.
- After the film flopped, screenwriter Trevor Farrant publicly blamed everyone else, accusing the production of adding "phallic and homosexual jokes" he didn't write and calling the McDonald's and Baskin-Robbins product placement "prostitution" that turned his script into "a travesty."
- As a tie-in promotion, Baskin-Robbins made a rum-flavored "Pirates' Gold" ice cream with butter brickle candy its flavor of the month, marketed with a pirate caricature of cast member Bill Kerr, who sells the ice cream from a cart in the film's opening.
- Fox cut 20 minutes out of the movie despite the objections of Ted Hamilton, who claimed the trim had "emasculated" the film and ruined a lot of the jokes; the studio was particularly sensitive to racial jokes.
- Star Christopher Atkins appeared on the cover of Playgirl magazine the same month the family-oriented film was released, an awkward mismatch given how taboo male nudity was in that era.
