Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning



The nerdy side of the web (you know, the side where all those pictures of Terri Hatcher were downloaded) is all a twitter about the Finnish fan film Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. It’s only available on P2P networks, which is probably a good thing because most people would probably get bitter if they actually paid to see it. As it is some people are giving it some good press, though I found the movie to be tough slog.



At first I thought the title “In the Pirkinning” meant something Finnish, but in fact it’s an English pun, just not a very good one. Captain Pirk is the main character, a selfish lout who, along with two members of his crew, has been trapped in the 21st Century after the events of the last Star Wreck movie. (I’m a little fuzzy on whether there are actually other live-action Star Wreck movies, or if that’s part of the joke.) Pirk passes time eating hamburgers and hitting on women, but one day he decides he wants more. Using scavenged technology he builds a Sovereign class starship (like the Enterprise-E) and convinces Russia to build dozens of more Federation vessels. Pirk conquers the world with this fleet, but it turns out that being Emperor Pirk isn’t as much fun as he thought. Pirk tries to find new planet to solve the problem of overcrowding, but his shoddily built Russian starships can’t get to other stars. Luckily Pirk’s fleet happens to find a wormhole to another dimension, home of Babylon 13, a very familiar looking space station. The inevitable hostilities erupt.

I should mention that Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning is a comedy, but not a very funny one. The acting is uniformly bad, and no one, especially the guy playing Pirk, looks the part. Being able to provide your own costume was probably the only requirement to get in the cast. All the female actors have that kind of borderline attractiveness I’ve come to associate with low budget filmmakers casting their own girlfriends. No one can sell a joke to save their lives.



What kind of jokes? Well, I’d say that 95% of all the jokes in In the Pirkinning fall into one of the following three categories:
 
- Mad Magazine style name substitutions. For example, Pirk’s crew is the android Info and the alien Dwarf. There’s a Russian captain named Fukov. Every single science fiction element is given a silly name, which gets distracting. Phasers are “Twinklers,” photon torpedoes are “light balls,” and even the worm hole is called a “maggot hole.” I spent more time decoding the silly names for things than getting into the story.

- Characters or things are Russian. Thanks to an American public school education I’m not sure where Finland is, but I take it they must must be a heck of college football rivalry between those two countries.

- Characters are drunk.

Combine "drunk" with "Russian" for odious comic relief squared. Combine drunk with a Russian with a silly name, and the result is comic relief so odious no one dares speak its name. The problem with all this is that that a parody of Star Trek should have jokes about Star Trek, but in fact they are shockingly rare in Star Wreck.

The one thing that makes In the Pirkinning noteworthy is the special effects. These Finns have put together some very nice home-brew footage of nearly every Next Generation-era Federation starship fighting nearly every Ranger-aligned spaceship from Babylon 5. Even I have to admit I got a charge out of seeing a Sovereign class vessel emerge out of a Bab 5 jump gate. It was also neat seeing Federation ships throw themselves against Victory class destroyer.



And that's when the Russian captain Fukov makes a mistake that results in light balls filled with beer being fired at the enemy.

Posted: Mon - October 10, 2005 at      

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