Sky Pirates (Colin Eggleston, 1986) aka Dakota Harris; prod. John Lamond; shot partly in Bora Bora and Easter Island; John Hargreaves (Dakota Harris), Meredith Phillips, Max Phipps, Bill Hunter, Simon Chilvers; pilot goes through time warp while looking for sacred stone
It’s not hard to see the antecedents of Sky Pirates in the two Indiana Jones films that preceded it. John Hargreaves must have been as heartily sick of wearing his ‘trademark’ sheepskin flying jacket in all weathers in every scene as Harrison Ford was of his leather jacket, hat and whip.
... in its feeble attempt to emulate Spielberg and Raiders of the Lost Ark, this looks more like one of those Italian rip-offs than the genuine article. John Lamond wrote and produced it, but left the direction to Colin Eggleston, and it is sad to see the man who made the interesting thriller Long Weekend (1978) involved in such tripe. Stratton: 80.
However, if one chooses to see the film, say, in the tradition of Italian 'exploitation' cinema with its 'rip-offs' of box-office formulae like that engendered by Raiders of the Lost Ark, then one can take an appropriately surrealist delight in the 'pulp poetry' of its sudden, arbitrary transitions (two characters simply die off-screen early on), cheap effects (a plane superimposed on a map signifies a journey), and erratic fluctuations in the technique and style (including the bizarrely grotesque death of a cleaning woman down an elevator shaft handled in the excessive manner of Dario Argento). Adrian Martin, Murray: 205.
Garry Gillard | New: 22 October, 2012 | Now: 28 June, 2020