People are voting emotionally.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

KNIGHTRIDERS is the kind of imaginative independent movie (like the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and MARTIN and DAWN OF THE DEAD) that puts the lie to the notion that only Hollywood can produce good films. KNIGHTRIDERS lacks the "sameness" typical of most Hollywood movies and is, instead, suffused with a strong '60s sensibility- and a genuine sentimentality. Romero seems to be saying that, if this is NOT how we are, it's certainly how we OUGHT to be. "If you die," one character tells Ed Harris, "your ideals die with you." To which Harris replies: "The TRUTH is our Code." KNIGHTRIDERS is a "busy" movie, to be sure, with a great deal going on (and familiar faces abound, including Stephen King chewing the scenery on the sidelines), but it's all happening under the sure-handed direction of the Master of Maverick Movie makers. Michael Gornick's cinematography is as gorgeous as ever, and the score by Donald Rubenstein is itself enough to bring a tear to the eye. The motorcycle stunts are spectacular and rival anything anyone else has ever put on screen. Romero and Company crafted something special this time out; this was, in retrospect, The Golden Age of Romero. Things would never really be the same again, "but still, alas, the echoes first that rang..."

OK, besides Ed Harris and Tom Savini, who else is in this amazing biker film from the early 80s? Well, it doesn't really matter because sometimes things just come together in a way that transcends what the likely original intent was, to patch together a biker movie about jousting knights who engage in feudal combat from motorcycles instead of horses. Yep. The costumes are a bit cheesy, the acting is a bit raw and amateurish and the story..., ah, the story: The story is the Arthurian tragedy of innocence, self sacrifice, honor and unfaithfulness. The tale works around the triad of the King, the very young Ed Harris, the villain, the wonderful Tom Savini and the knight protector, Lancelot, Gary Lahti. Each of these figures represents an archetype which very likely unbeknown to the film makers and they come through wonderfully in the way in which this tale is patched together. Billy,as the King Arthur prototype is idealistic, uncompromising loyal to his own mythology and like the legendary Arthur, ego-less. His loyal knight retainer, Alan, is Lancelot in his nobility and loyalty to his sovereign while coveting his wife all the time. Savini is purely delightful as the Modred counterpart, even taking Morgan le Fay's name as a pun. Morgan covets the crown and tries to usurp it by going off only to discover his new realm is a forest of paper tigers. The final scene and resolution of the tragedy works wonderfully, giving a the only glimpse of the famous story-teller and raconteur, Brother Blue as the wizard, Merlin.As an anthropologist and mythologist, I saw this tale back in the early 80s and was impressed how the underlying mythology of an essentially low budget film held together in such a wonderful way in spite of a few flaws. I consider it a cult classic.

...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.

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.