BlazeLime Strong and Moving!

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

DreddMancunian A young Ed Harris is the first thing most people will notice about this movie. But look a little deeper, and you will find a beautiful little story about keeping your ideals amid a world corrupted by money. The Knightriders are a travelling fair of motorcycle jousters comprised of various marginalized characters, who live an idyllic existence outside of society. Tom Savini shines as the unscrupulous knight who falls prey to a greedy talent agent. However nothing is as simple as that. Some characters learn from their mistakes, while others do not. An earnest message about the evils of consumerism and the perils of following the herd that is still relevant in today's materialistic culture. Excellent performances abound from the varied cast. While there are plenty of gut-wrenching motorcycle stunts to keep everyone entertained. This is a film about innocence lost and found, with a bittersweet ending that propels the film into the realm of the mythic. One of George A Romero's finest.

Jonny_Numb ...it seems like you do your best work when shuffling, flesh-craving reanimated corpses are involved. There's a reason the "Living Dead" tetralogy is the stuff of legend and Romero's 'side-projects' are mostly little-known footnotes within his career--while often artistically innovative and unconventional, efforts like "Monkey Shines," "Bruiser," and "Knightriders" are--at best--tonally uneven experiences. Here we have a modern-day Ren Faire tent community that travels from town to town, putting on jousting competitions (done on motorcycles, natch) and living the medieval lifestyle in a modern world. Romero uses this postmodernist fairy tale to frame a heavy-handed (and overlong) meditation on man's code of honor and what it takes to hang onto it in a world where everybody else is "selling out" to live a life of luxury (yes, an up-and-coming rock band could have easily been substituted for the Ren Faire). The film is ponderous at points (with many sledgehammer-obvious monologues), repetitive at others (while the jousting tournaments are a marvel of slick editing, they don't vary much), and the premise is treated so seriously that at times it's hard not to laugh (and granted, there is a lot of intentional humor as well). Despite all this, Romero's voice does come out in certain dialog scenes, and the production is wonderfully photographed by Michael Gornick; the performances vary (with a young Ed Harris all over the map), but Tom Savini shows some formidable chops as a potential traitor to the cause. The commentary on the 'knights'' displacement in a world given in to modernity meets an uneven end (blatantly ripping off "Easy Rider"), but "Knightriders" is an oddly transfixing--albeit inferior--piece of work.

Brandt Sponseller I can see the potential here. Bikers engaging in medieval games on their hogs is a fun idea. So is an almost cult-like group organized around a charismatic leader posing as a king. In addition to the cult group dynamics, it allows an exploration of medieval social roles in a modern setting, including the reaction of outsiders to this strange group. Because they're on the road, we also have gypsy themes, allusions to Easy Rider, and even elements very similar to a rock 'n' roll band going crazy while touring.But something went seriously wrong when it came to making those ideas into a film. It's a combination of things really: * For much of Knightriders, there's really not much of a story. There are long scenes where all characters are in stasis. There are too many long scenes of the tournaments--too many because despite the impressiveness of the stunts, they're shot and edited so that all dramatic tension is lost. When more of a plot is attempted, it's not usually explained very well. Chunks of exposition seem to be missing. Characters come and go without much explanation. There are major characters who we never get to know anything about. There are times when the story becomes a bit more interesting and coherent, but they're few and far between, and all good will they engender is usually demolished in the next couple scenes.* The editing is some of the worst work I've ever seen in a "major" film. A lot of scenes seem to be put together randomly, as if they literally threw shots into the air in the cutting room and reassembled them as they grabbed them.* The acting is pretty uniformly awful. The only person I liked was Stephen King, and he only had a cameo for maybe 90 seconds total screen time. Ed Harris overacts ridiculously. Tom Savini is too often awkward. Romero apparently told everyone to play the film serious as a heart attack (only King didn't listen), and it has the effect of making every character annoying, as well as making an inherently absurd premise, with apparently insane characters, far too droll.* Romero makes a ton of bad decisions here for cinematography. Poorly chosen, poorly framed shots are the norm. The few good shots stick out like a sore thumb because of this. It's a pretty ugly film. And for that matter, the costumes, props, "sets" and such tend to be ugly too. I don't mean that it should be "pretty" and "pleasant". Rather, it should have visual aesthetic merit appropriate to the subject matter rather than having all the appeal of a washed-out mid-70s low budget porno.* The score is similarly ugly.Knightriders almost makes Romero's Bruiser (2000) look good in comparison.

Timmy Church I really thought I was in store for some classic post-Punk mayhem a la Deathrace 2000 or Dead-End Drive-In (which are both fine movies) but instead I saw one of the best movies I've ever seen. Call me a sap but I had tears welling up in my eyes for the entire last forty minutes. Rarely does clarity of direction and story-telling go hand-in-hand with such an unusual movie. Excellent performances are derived from both the actorly and realist schools and even a little over-the-top style but the different kinds don't clash, they combine to make it a fuller, richer film altogether.I had never really wondered what it would be like if Christopher Lee and Meadowlark Lemon had a son but now I know.Beautiful camera-work and a truly human sympathy for even minor characters (Julie Dean on her porch, the Troubadour talking to King Billy) make all scenes watchable and invaluable.This movie is humane and beautiful. A real treat. Odd as hell, to be sure, but remarkable.