'The Ice Pirates' ends up an exercise in what might have been

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but what they don't say is your imitators will by definition be undertalented squad of hacks who drag your work down with crummy-by-association.

My bindle-tying skills are admired far and wide, yet if your only exposure to it is "One-Tooth" Joe's shoddy knotwork, you'd take me for a real greenhorn. On the other hand, witnessing a derivative but sometimes-funny copycat like 1984's The Ice Pirates can remind you just why you fell in love with the original in the first place.

In a galaxy where war has stripped the worlds of nearly all their water, ice pirate Robert Urich and his outlaw crew try to kidnap princess Mary Crosby, only to be captured and sold into slavery to her. But their purchase isn't fueled by vengeance: Crosby's father disappeared looking for a lost water world, and Urich's band may have what it takes to track him down.

Complete with clumsy droids, personal spacecraft, and ill-defined royalty, The Ice Pirates has an awful lot in common with another movie that rhymes with Bar Bores. Only goofier.

Like when Urich and buddy Michael D. Roberts are tossed on an assembly line to be turned into lobotomized eunuch servants. I can't remember the last time I heard so many castration jokes, and I've seen Snips: The Musical. Their ship's defense computer is a parody of Space Invaders. It's a little like if Spaceballs were made three years earlier and about twenty years cruddier.

Yet it's not completely worthless. The supporting cast includes Angelica Huston, early-career Ron Perlman (his only film role prior to this was as a caveman. It was a documentary), and, in the part he was born to play, the severed head of Bruce Vilanch. Also it has lots of swords. Not lightsabers or beam-claymores, but pirate cutlasses. Rather than being a mindless stylistic choice, this is surely a nod to the harsh realities of space travel: you can't go shooting guns inside a pressurized ship! Except when they do that, too.

Yet somehow silly, uneven romps like this always pull together for a smasher of an ending that makes you wonder why the whole thing wasn't that great. The Ice Pirates is no exception, barreling through a time-bending climax that, for just a few minutes, feels like a wonderful clip from the parallel universe of What Might Have Been.