Nate & Hayes vs. The Pirate Movie

A good number of the members of vagueidea have seen, and loved, Nate & Hayes. I was trying to describe the movie to my wife, trying to find out if she had ever seen it. She asked if the movie involved a Pirate King. The confused look on my face answered her question immediately, so she proceeded to describe another movie that starred the guy from The Blue Lagoon. I looked it up, and it was aptly named The Pirate Movie. I added both movies to my netflix queue, and that was that.

We watched N&H the first night, and it was everything I remembered and more. The copy that I had seen (repeatedly) was recorded from cable some time in the 80’s, and had been watched so many times that the quality was piss-poor, so the digital quality of DVD was immediately noticeable. The movie as a whole was just as I had remembered. Tommy Lee Jones played Bully Hayes as he plays most characters; cool. Michael O’Keefe’s performance makes you want to gouge your eyes out, but then the character of Nate isn’t supposed to be likeable until halfway through the movie. The poor performance makes this challenging, however, and left my wife with a poor impression of the movie. This was a part of my teen years, and it was her first viewing, so she didn’t have the nostalgia that I did.

The next night we watched TPM. When I first added it to my queue, netflix pointed out that people that liked it also liked Xanadu, which I had already seen. This should have been an indication as to its quality. TPM was based on The Pirates of Penzance, and was a musical. Yes, a pirate musical starring the guy from The Blue Lagoon. The whole movie is a dream sequence, and carries with it a level of silliness that only a dream-sequence-pirate-musical can. There were not so subtle references to Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, each of which had me saying, “Aww, come on!” So blatant, and so silly. When the movie was over, I was coming to terms with loving it for being so bad. Now that several days have passed, I love to hate it.

So, all ye pirate lovers, and land-lubbers, ye be warned, says I.