Yellowbeard (DVD)

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Harrrrrr.

Make that, Harrrrr de harr harr.

Pirate films have long been ripe for a good spoof, and some of the Monty Python boys gave it a go in 1983 with "Yellowbeard." That same year, you may recall, the full Python troupe released "The Meaning of Life," in which bored cubicle people in an office hi-rise mutiny and take over the building that morphs into a ship. So pirates were on Graham Chapman's and John Cleese's minds back then. What I'd like to know is, why didn't the rest of them join the two main Python handlers in this satire of the Spanish Main?

Maybe Chapman and Cleese wanted to commandeer their own comedy ship and launch a separate attack. If so, they shanghaied one heck of a comic cast, including Peter Boyle, Kenneth Mars and Marty Feldman ("Young Frankenstein"), Madeline Kahn ("Blazing Saddles"), Peter Cook ("Saturday Night Live"), and Cheech & Chong (their own world). But the high-powered cast seems almost underutilized in a film that steers a surprisingly straight course at times. Cheech & Chong appear only briefly (if you blink, you'll miss them), so don't let their billboard-sized heads on the cover art lead you to think this is their movie. Maybe it should have been, because the two of them are hilarious in their limited space. But the narrative is much more on-compass I would have thought, and maybe that's why the full troupe didn't sign on.

The pirating action is as realistic as you'll see in any buccaneer film—even more so, because you see the tip of a sword come out the back of a sailor instead of the usual side shot where you know the blade is between the body and arm. And though the plot isn't exactly the same, "Yellowbeard" owes one heck of a debt to "Treasure Island." There's the tavern, the boy (in this case, Martin Hewitt as the 20 year old that Yellowbeard is told is his son), the blind man (here, Cleese as Harvey "Blind" Pew), the old pirate (Chapman as Yellowbeard) and the expedition to recover the pirate's old treasure. The scenes that most resemble ones from the Robert Louis Stevenson classic are perhaps not coincidentally the most reverently adventure-oriented. It's as if Chapman and Cleese couldn't decide whether to go for laughs or homage.

There are some laughs here, but feminists beware: some of the funniest lines have to do with rape and mistreatment of women.

Betty: "Well, it's been awhile since he had a little cuddle."
Yellowbeard: "I raped ya, if that's what you mean."

Yellowbeard: "I'm sure I killed the last one I raped, it can't have been you."