Star Knight (El Caballero del Dragón)

Rating:
Summary: Star Knight Star Bright
Review: A nifty little movie with a flying saucer visiting the world of knights & wizards in old Europe. Good actors, Okay movie. Unfortunately there is a flaw, and it is a huge one. The producer's of this DVD should have spent a little more time on it. The audio and video don't track together, with the audio being about one second ahead of the visual. This renders the entire movie into bad comedic farce. Unfortunately the effect is not entertaining, but rather is a headache. I would have to recomend that you avoid this film, at least until some other company creates a viewable version.

Rating:
Summary: Weird. Just plain weird.
Review: Most people with anything to compare Star Knight to would probably give it the lowest rating possible, not only for its B-quality, but also for being so undecided in what it's trying to be. The film is medieval fantasy juxtaposed with science fiction. That's fine. But stuffed into the script are elements of a special-FX flick, a slapstick comedy, a martial arts movie, a fairy tale, and a sci-fi drama, but none of the above being particularly good. This mish-mash is primo material for Mystery Science 3000.

Thinking that Star Knight is just odd enough to have a cult following, I checked online for evidence and found only a few mentions, including two rather glowing reviews. One even praised the special effects, done in 1992, though they looked to me to be the same vintage as Zardoz (1974). But while Star Knight is a totally negligible film on its own terms, it does have some potentially interesting aspects for strange-film buffs.

The story opens on medieval times: peasants in idyllic surroundings pay taxes to the king's taxman, played by Harvey Keitel, if you can believe that. In the king's basement dwells the alchemist, Bothus, played by Klaus Kinski, still more unbelievably. Then there's the king's daughter Alba, played by some actress. She is old enough to desire romance. Then there's the priest, who has a deep distrust for science.

The order of things is quickly thrown into chaos by the appearance of a spaceship. The peasants believe it to be a dragon and demand that the king and Keitel defend them from it before they pay any more taxes. Meanwhile, Alba goes riding in the forest with her governess. In spite of the latter's nagging, she goes skinny dipping in the river, swimming toward mysterious bubbles coming from below. In a montage of underwater nudity and the facile effect of running film backwards, Alba is sucked below the surface and is gone.

She reappears a little later in a trance, and only Bothus, using hypnosis, can cure her. In spite of the alchemist's success, the priest fabricates a connection between the scientist and infernal forces, and then condemns him for these unsubstantiated diabolical ties. With Alba cured, however, the king sends his lisping town crier to find a knight who will defeat the strange river-dwelling monster. Keitel volunteers, saying in his best Brooklynese iambic quadrameter, "The dragon I shall slay for thee!"

Keitel's rendition of Sir Thomas Malory's Arthurian English is totally comical. Intentionally so? It's hard to tell. Keitel doesn't do much to hide the accent he used in Pulp Fiction, and later in the movie, he does some slapstick pratfalls. Maybe this film is a comedy, but as I've suggested above, I don't think it ever made up its mind one way or the other. Whether intended to make you laugh or not, you may well get a chuckle hearing Keitel say "Ye, poltroon," and "Thou, varlet."

As Keitel, the priest, the king, and The Green Knight (a seemingly intentional comic relief character, poorly lifted from Monty Python's Holy Grail) bumble about, Alba finds the "dragon" again. She boards the space ship and meets the star of the movie, a mute alien who communicates by theremin. Somehow Alba understands his waahs and woos, and this leads to dialogue like:

"Why won't you take your helmet off and kiss me?"

"Waaaahh. Woooo."

"It will kill you to remove your helmet? But why?

"Woooo. Waaaahhh."

"You can't breathe the same air as me? That's ridiculous."

"Waaa-waaah. Woo-wooo. Tinky-winky."

"I'm tired of your words."

"Waah. Woo-waaah."

"Stop saying 'I can't.'"

"Woooooooo."

"Don't blaspheme!"

Have you ever seen Evil Dead 2? I got a similar feeling from this film. It's a feeling that the movie is a spoof, not because it was written as such, but because, during the making of the movie, it became obvious to cast and crew that it could be nothing else.

Having a mute, clueless alien move about in a clueless earth culture means that the script has to stretch to incredible lengths to make anything actually happen. One fight scene occurs in which a single martial-arts tumble is executed by Ayex the Aryan alien. The fight ends when Keitel manages to steal Ayex's armor, killing Ayex on the spot. Except that Bothus shows up with an elixir that saves Ayex and enables him to breathe earth air.

Keitel and the evil priest wind up boarding the space ship and shooting into outer space with no way of controlling the ship. Ayex develops the power to have his head glow, which makes the peasants believe he is a saint. The king grants him his daughter's hand, but not speaking any English, the aloof alien can only make his head glow in reply. And everyone lives happily ever after.

What can I say? This is a weird film. It's B-quality all the way, but I was mildly entertained in spite of, or because of that.