Space 1979 Random Pile 2: The one with knights on motorcycles

 

Title: Knightriders

What Year?: 1981

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity/ Mashup

Rating: What The Hell??? (3/5)

 

With this review, I’m continuing the “random” theme, and the foremost difficulty has been trying not to make this a straight-up ‘70s lineup. Naturally, I had plenty of material from the 1980s, yet there weren’t that many that I found better to include here than elsewhere. Then, in the best “random” tradition, I had something land in my lap that is easily one of the strangest movies I have viewed, and I knew I had what I needed, to the point that I deferred another review to get to it while everything is fresh in my mind. With that, I present Knightriders, a film from the maker of Night of the Living Dead about Renaissance reenactors… and motorcycles.

Our story begins with a man and his consort awaking in the woods. They promptly dress in Medieval garb and ride off on a motorcycle. It turns out that these are Billy and Julie, the king and queen of a troupe of Renaissance-fair reenactors who have substituted motorcycles for horses. We follow them through one of their tourneys, where the king fairs poorly against Morgan, a self-styled Black Knight who clearly hopes to become leader of the band of misfits. They also run into real-life troubles with a small-town sheriff who locks up Billy when he refuses to pay a bribe. As their misadventures continue, the king continues to brood on the injustices of modern life, the allure of commercialism and his own tenuous hold on the loyalties of the troop. The internal and external conflicts come to a head when one of their jousts endangers the onlookers, all while Morgan prepares for a new challenge. Can the king and his knight settle their differences gracefully, or has the modern world already pushed him too far?

Knightriders was a drama by George Romero, following his highly successful horror/ zombie film Dawn of the Dead. The lead role was given to Ed Harris, who also appeared in Romero’s Creepshow, with Patricia Tallman as his lady and effects guy Tom Savini as Morgan. The supporting cast included many actors from Dawn of the Dead and/ or its 1985 sequel Day of the Dead, including Ken Foree, Joe Pilato and Christine Forrest, who married Romero around the time the movie was filmed in 1980. Stephen King made a cameo appearance as an onlooker. The movie was released in April of 1981, with a running time of 145 minutes. It received favorable reviews at the time and since, but failed to attract interest either among mainstream audiences or Romero’s horror fan base. The director’s next major foray outside the “zombie” genre was 1988’s Monkey Shines, a dramatic film  with horror and science fictional elements.

For my experiences, I took notice of this movie while considering other Romero films for possible review. It should go without saying that I deeply admire his work, but it has usually fallen outside the scope of what I do for my reviews. For this feature in particular, the only one I had seriously considered is The Crazies, but repeatedly passed on it because of its content. It’s been my further quiet concession that Romero did better when he started to move beyond zombie movies, with his very best film probably being Monkey Shines. (And yes, I still have fewer issues with that one than The Crazies!) Once I caught wind of this one, I decided I finally had something worth including. I ordered it with genuine optimism, and was quickly impressed by its sheer audacity. The trouble is, it’s so… damn… long.

For the movie’s better points, one really can’t get much further than the jousting sequences. Seeing the fully armed and armored knights go at each other on motorcycles is a surreal, almost hallucinogenic experience, like King Arthur crossed with Mad Max. As is typical for Romero, the most jarring part is that it’s all portrayed in a deceptively linear and traditional way. There’s no choppy editing, wonky camera angles or random “shock” images to imply that this is a lazy filmmaker’s idea of a descent into madness. What gets even stranger is that once the tourneys are over, many if not most of the players proceed with their “normal” lives and activities without any marked change in their characters, and that in itself starts to feel like a subtly horrifying kind of madness. One can argue whether reenactors then or now would really be like this, but it’s an honest premise used to good effect. There’s a further sense of a “chicken or egg” paradox; either they’ve been doing this long enough that their sense of reality is warped, or like a latter-day Don Quixote, it’s just the outworking of a deeper rebellion against mundane reality.

The problem already mentioned prominently is that this would have made a fine film an 100 minutes or less, but instead drags the viewer to that mark with the better part of an hour left. By that point, even the jousts are starting to wear thin. What really wears out the film’s welcome is that it becomes apparent that these characters aren’t that likeable. Like the actual knights and lords, their ideals are directly at odds with how they treat each other, though they are at least evidently tolerant of non-white and non-heterosexual members of the troupe. The most fun to be had is Savini, following up his turn as a raider in Dawn as a hammed-up stage villain who at least has real ideas about getting things done. Unfortunately, Harris suffers by comparison alone; he can talk a good game about the troupe as a way of life, but increasingly, he is really just sulking about more and more people questioning his status. The closest we get to redemption is the arc with the corrupt cop, which of all things could and should have gotten more screen time. The frustrating part is that there is no development to fill the time between the first encounter and Billy’s vengeance, which leaves it as just one more random sequence among many.

Now I’m ready for the “one scene”, and I’m going with a scene a little past the hour mark. Billy and a companion have gotten out of jail, with his companion still bandaged from a brutal beating, to rejoin the group around a nightly campfire. Several members give him a lengthy talk why the troupe need money, and he waxes more loftily than usual about the evils of commercialism. Then the friend begins his own tale, beginning with a remark about another beating for being a “n*gger lover”. As he tells his tale, a physician named Merlin, who is definitely not white but doesn’t look “black” either, starts accompanying him with a harmonica. It’s an inspired moment that gives our clearest glimpse of the group’s deeper ideals. However, it just brings us back to the problem of whether these people are really accomplishing anything. To be sure, their sheer non-conformity is an effective protest, but how many of them have ever showed up for a greater cause? It’s all the more sobering to consider what evils were emerging or escalating just at the time the movie was made. Would people like this really have turned out for the oppressed at home and abroad, or would they be too wrapped up in their play-acting to notice?

In closing, my final thought is why I have chosen to include this movie at all. To me, the most comparable film to this one is Duel, if only because both “feel” like they belong in genres they aren’t quite a part of. If Duel was almost science fiction, this is almost fantasy. What further unites the two films is a distinctly post-apocalyptic atmosphere in the absence of the apocalypse itself. Civilization as we know it may continue to function, but the possibility of its downfall remains, and this movie goes just enough further to ask if the world wouldn’t be better for it.  It may not be enough to forgive its flaws, but it at least balances against them. That’s enough for me to give this one a pass.