A group of h***y teenagers accidentally release a demonic pirate from his haunted treasure chest, and for the next 80 minutes he stomps around the coast hacking off heads and spewing pirate puns. While he does, the surviving pair of wrongly-accused young lovers try to elude the cops and prove that, yes, it was a demonic pirate doing all the killing, “and not, you know, us”.
And that, in a nutshell, is the plot of “Jolly Roger”, the latest production from the Corman-esque genre house, The Asylum, continuing their series of murderers from bygone eras resurrected to do mayhem in modern day (next up, Calvin Coolidge wreaks havok in “The Silent Killer”!). While just as dumb as “Death Valley: the Legend of Bloody Bill”, “Jolly Roger” is way more fun. And with a decapitation nearly every two minutes (for the record, he’s lopping off the noggins of the descendents of his former, mutinous crew), director Jones certainly knows how to keep the red flowing.
Now writer Jones (who co-wrote the script with Jeff Miller) has a lot more to answer for. To begin with, police-procedure is little more than a theoretical concept here. Folks are named suspects even though there is little (or, okay, nothing) tying them to certain crime scenes, you have a coroner who doesn’t know anything about how the human body works and cannot, by his own admission, determine time-of-death, and can only correctly diagnose when someone dies of natural causes. The only member of the force to have remembered anything about her training is a deputy (played by the ever-pleasant Kim Little (“Jane White is Sick and Twisted”), who actually tries to save the day a couple of times by, well, doing her job.
But if you don’t let logic bother you, you’ll have a good time with “Jolly Roger”. Because, let’s face it, you don’t get rampaging pirates every day.
