rglasgow I struggled with how to rate this film. I really did. See I love kitchy horror films - which is what this was. This film had no pretensions of being classy or intellectual; it set out to be just a block of solid entertainment, and it succeeded.That said, it was a truly awful film. So ultimately I decided I'd rate it as a 3 star film and proceed from there.The start seems to start us off as a slasher film starring six teens; until four of them are offed in the first ten minutes. Next followed the single worst part of the movie; sitting around the police station with unbelievable actions on the part of the police and truly terrible acting on the part of everyone.But it all gets better quickly as we cut back to our favourite pirate (and my favourite character) Jolly Roger as he proceeds to decapitate all those that get in the way of his lucky chaaaaaaaarrrrrms, which happen to be heads.And that's basically the film. An undead psycho pirate hunting down people and cutting their heads off. Of course, the number one scene in the film is where Roger rips a bouncer's arm off and proceeds to beat him to death with it. Honestly, how can you get better then that? Well, you can if you bother to sit through the credits. I let them roll for a while and the end warnings are truly amazing, "The events, characters... purely fictitious. Really. Any similarity to actual... is purely coincidental, and very weird. We suggest moving, and/or staying away from hooks, planks, and cats o' nine tails or more." Honestly, that's what it says. It also makes sure we know that, "No animals, strippers, or pirates were hurt during the production of this screenplay." And that's why this film is amazing. It's a bad film that KNOWS it's a bad film and will make fun of it. It was easy to watch, fun to mock, and if you don't find yourself wanting to make a pirate joke or talk in a pirate voice every few minutes you have no soul.

Brandt Sponseller This is another one of those in-betweeners--similar to Kali: Tears of a Clown or whatever the hell the name of that film was . . . oh, yeah--after working up the energy to click a couple times, I see the proper name of that one was just Tears of Kali. An in-betweener is a film that's not low-budget-crappy enough to be directed by John Specht, but no major studio put 20 million dollars into this puppy, either, so you can't expect something as slick as, say, I Know What You Did Last Summer. In fact, IMDb is telling me that Jolly Roger was made for a mere 500 grand. For that amount of money, and considering how "hiss" poor this could have been if Sub Rosa would have backed it instead, this isn't a half bad film.In fact, I popped it into my DVD player with the anxiety that it was going to one of those shot-on-a-99-dollar-DXG-video-camera messes where I can't hear any of the dialogue unless I crank up my stereo to 10 and put on a pair of headphones, but director Gary Jones and crew went to pains to ensure that this back-from-the-dead avenging Pirate slasher flick looks and plays relatively professional. That's not to say that you can't tell that this is a low budget indie: the acting can be rougher than the Pennsylvania leg of the Appalachian Trail; you'll swear that at least one actor had to be a producer or closely related to a producer; the music has a generic porno film quality; there are a number of weird jumps in the narrative where it seems like a reel of film or at least a couple script pages must have been lost but they just didn't think it was that important; it's often difficult to tell if the script was supposed to be written as more of a comedy--you'll certainly be laughing at some dialogue and events--like the ridiculous cop/coroner(?) and the fact that one protagonist figures that the best way to record a list of names off of carved stone with a paper and pencil is to do a rubbing.But despite all of those blemishes, despite the fact that the plot is obviously cribbed a bit from The Fog and the villain was designed to cash in on the mega-success of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean films, I found myself enjoying Jolly Roger more often than not, and it's not just because of the traditional slasher film move of showing plenty of breastages--although that certainly didn't hurt.The title character is a nice, kinda campy idea for a new slasher villain. Jones and co-writer Jeff Miller wrote a simple but captivating and even occasionally suspenseful story where they do a decent job of weaving together a few different threads. Jones' timing is pretty good--the film has a nice flow aside from those few weird narrative jumps. Although some of the acting is rough, some is not bad at all. They found great locations. They made the smart move of putting a lot of the money they had into cameras, film, sound and effects.I know some people said that the effects in the film looked cheap, and occasionally, they do look fake--for example, the Jolly Roger character clearly has a mask on with black makeup around his eye--but for this budget level, the effects are pretty incredible. There are decapitated heads galore, for example, which are modeled just as well as any 100 million dollar film. The actual scenes of violence--often leading up to those fake heads--are slightly rougher, but they're not at all bad. Rough technical problems are often cleverly shot around, and you'll never EVER see effects even a quarter as good in a Sub Rosa film unless they have a serious change of production philosophy and probably an influx of inheritance money from some long lost member of the Stanze clan. Even the Jolly Roger character, despite the obvious mask, isn't at all bad. The design of the character is great overall, and I actually prefer that Jones didn't just shoot his face in darkness all the time--a viewer should be able to use some imagination.Don't pass this one up just because it's not perfect--just don't expect anything high gloss, and watch it with a sense of humor--there are occasional moments of enjoyable, sublime absurdity for those of you like me who enjoy that kind of thing. I'd love to see what Jones and his collaborators could do with a Jolly Roger sequel if they had at least 10 times the budget and maybe some input from Frank Henenlotter.

Ray Newby A rather jolly film if you pardon the pun, but not really very frightening. The plot is very reminiscent of "The Fog". A dead pirate comes back and kills descendants of his crew who mutinied against him 300 years earlier. It's a film to watch if there is nothing else on the TV. Don't take it too seriously and treat it as a bit of fun. The acting is not of a great standard. There would certainly not be any Oscar nominations for this picture. I haven't heard of any of the cast although the leading lady, Kristina Korn is quite pleasing on the eye. The decapitation scenes, of which there are many are humorous but certainly not scary.

spence711 it really does in the beginning 6 kids are camping on a beach and a skull pops up and two kids open a treasure chest (dumbasses) i mean treasure chests don't get on shores by themselves so that must mean its cursed and so the skull turns into a demonic pirate he kills 4 of the kids the other two are thought to of killed them so they escape to find the killer and then we find out that jolly roger's shipmates killed him and took his treasure so he must cut off the heads of their grandkids to get his treasure back (what what) you mean to tell me that treasure can appear just by cutting off the heads of the people who stole it treasure dosen't appear just like that i'd like to play superman 64 then watch this oh and the ending sux badly if you want better pirate movies just wait for pirates of the Caribbean 2 a 2 out of 10 and i hope it burns in hell