DVD Reviews: The Pirate Movie

The Pirate Movie is the tale of the pirates of Penzance, to give you a basic idea of the story a young man who when orphaned was taken in by pirates found himself discussed with his occupation and on his 18th birthday when his pirate contract was up decides to leave the ship.  Now there’s allot of dancing, singing, and prancing around so if you don’t like musicals don’t bother.  

The intro to the pirate story is lame, a young girl finds herself in a small town with a bunch of friends, to start things off her friends are horrible to her and disrespect her every chance they get.  What great friends, when she finally finds a guy that likes her, her friends get her to go get the food for the yacht trip and just as she arrives they snatch the bag of food and hold down the guy and sail off into the distance.  When she tries to follow in a very small hire yacht she is caught in a storm and because she has o idea what she is doing is knocked unconscious and thrown overboard.  Soon after she is washed up on the beach and her hallucinations begin, hence the corny intro.   

From there it jumps straight into the pirates of Penzance story, a young boy who despises pirates and when his contract is up at age 18 he decides to leave the pirates and become their enemy.  Upon reaching shore he finds the beautiful daughter of a general though they have a rule that the oldest daughter must get married first and then the next oldest and so on and so on.  Besides all of this the young couple devise a plan to earn her fathers trust and win each others hand in marriage.  A long time ago the family’s fortune was stolen by he pirates and hidden very well; the only problem is that the map of where the treasure is hidden is tattooed on the back of the pirate captain’s back, the couple decide to trick the pirate into thinking he is going to get somewhere with the young girl in order to copy the map from his back so that they can retrieve the treasure; hence get married. 

Just when the young boy earns the trust of her father and must bring down the pirates he is reminded of his birthday; 29th of February, realizing he has only four birthdays he is still bound by his pirate contract, thus he must remain a pirate.  The young boy is so dedicated to his word he must retain his contract, and back in those days your word was as good as a binding legal contract and so he must obey. 

This causes a horrible turn of events where he must betray his first love and rob her rich family; again.  The story is light hearted throughout and it’s a bit of a musical, not all dialogue is sung but there are still about ten odd songs in the movie.  It does have a funny ending; pirate ending that is still keeping in mind that this is all just a dream. 

Extras are completely non-existent unless of course you class chapter selection and language selection.  The menu also is pretty basic with just stills from scene to scene the menu system is in no way animated, but I would have to say that the picture quality is very reasonable considering that I saw the original tape in the video store just the other day and it seems to be in quite bad condition, so I was surprised by the picture and sound quality for such an old movie.  Though I wouldn’t have expected this movie to get to DVD but as time goes by it seems that all the production companies are going to bring everything they have out on DVD eventually. 

Unfortunately for this particular movie I’m not a fan of musicals, but as far as these types of movies go this one wasn’t too bad at all, I would usually give a musical a score under five but I enjoyed this one so I shall raise my score and I mean if I’m giving a musical a seven, then it can’t be all bad!