Kirk: Do you know what our problem is?
Flint: Financing sir?
Kirk: No, it's that damn Johnny Depp.
An obscure film but beloved within its cult following, Pirates of the Great Salt Lake is the heart-warming tale of two modern would be pirates... wandering around the Great Salt Lake.
A 2006 Mollywood
comedy, we follow two out-of-luck smoes as they sail row across the Lake, attempting to plunder and ravage modern Utah, only to find that they're not very successful. When they just so happen to find a genuine Treasure Map, their luck changes ...From Bad to Worse.
This Film contains examples of:
- All Girls Want Bad Boys The reason Ruby isn't interested in Flint, and why she is interested after he shows up as a pirate. When she finds out the police are after him she gets really interested, and when he mentions he'd killed a man she throws herself at him.
- Angel Unaware possibly the narrator.
- Artistic License – Geology: Subverted, much to everyone's surprise. It turns out the banks of the Great Salt Lake have shifted quite a bit in the centuries since the treasure was lost.
- Audience? What Audience?: after Kirk dies, he can see the narrator but not the audience the narrator is talking to.Kirk: I think he's talking to that grove of trees...
- Barred from the Afterlife: Pirates can't get into heaven. That's what Pirate Heaven is for. Dying from the curse, or even loosely associated with the curse, will cause you to hang around as a ghost.
- Butt-Monkey: Drake, but only after he kills Kirk, so it's well deserved.
- Chekhov's Gun: The hole the narrator digs in the first scene. Also doubles as a Chekhov's Gag
- Coming-Out Story The scene where Kirk tells his mother he's a pirate is played out like this one for laughs.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: The entire plot would have been avoided if somebody had paid a bill for the equivalent of 5 2006 dollars, as pointed out several times.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?:
- Kirk's mother walks in on him rubbing his wooden sword while watching a video of two pirates in swordplay.
- Kirk's pirate identity being an innate trait he refuses to suppress anymore and his mom wanting the best for him but feeling she can't support him for religious reasons is played dead straight as a coming-out story.
- Fishing for Sole: Flint is doing this when we first see him. The boot he catches happens to half of a treasure map inside, jumpstarting the plot. What he expected to catch in a lake with no fish remains a mystery.
- Freudian Excuse: Kirk's mom developed her loathing of pirates in childhood by being annoyed by a waiter dressed a pirate, mugged for her Halloween candy by a pack of bullies dressed as pirates, and walking in on her father dressed up as a pirate and suggestively wittling a wooden sword to old pirate movies in one traumatic night.
- Gratuitous Spanish: When Drake meets the mapmaker he tries to talk to him in broken Spanish for no readily apparent reason. The mapmaker replies that he doesn't speak Spanish (in Spanish).
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: Flint and Kirk are joined at the hip through most of the movie, even after Flint dies. Although if it weren't for all the Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today? moments they both throw in when it gets too blatant you could easily assume they're romantically involved. Especially since Flint hooked up with the first man who'd take him after Ruby turned him down (that's verbatim how they met) and Kirk's becoming a pirate is treated like coming out.
- Honor Before Reason: When the pair fails to successfully rob some picnickers but the would-be victims offer them some lunch as thanks for the entertainment Kirk refuses to accept it and stomps off in a huff.
- Identical Stranger: Many of the actors play multiple parts, not just as a money-saving technique but for definite laughs. The mapmaker actually recognizes Flint as the captain from 200 years ago (from a photo that explicitly predates cameras) and tries to collect on an unpaid bill.
- Inexplicably Awesome: The mapmaker who is: either hundreds of years old or a series of Identical Grandsons, has the power to cast and remove curses, can see ghosts, and has been seen to recover from death several times.
- Insistent Terminology: Kirk and Flint keep insisting the Great Salt Lake is a sea.
- Magical Native American: The Narrator. Played for laughs, although the ending hints he might be an angel. Or maybe just nuts.
- Mood Whiplash The movies makes a fast turn to the dramatic when Drake murders Kirk and then swings back when Kirk reappears as a ghost two minutes later.
- Obstructive Code of Conduct: Kirk refuses to eat anything he didn't steal. He is not amused when people try to use Loophole Abuse to offer him lunch.
- A Pirate 400 Years Too Late: The film centres are two wanna-be pirates in modern Utah.
- Talk Like a Pirate: Drake does this when he's dressed up, where it conflicts amusingly with his bored drawl. Kirk makes a vague attempt at a more upper class British accent to fit his role as officer, and Flint just speaks normally with pirate slang mixed in.
- Theme Park Version: Kirk and Flint take most of their cues from old pirate movies, but do get the griminess right. Later when Drake dresses up as part of a scam, he takes this up to eleven with something he obviously bought from a cheap costume store.
