Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I never heard of this show in my childhood until recently, when I stumbled upon Watchmojo's top 10 Kid Game Shows list when I heard of it. I was captivated by what I saw, four kids (one of them the dungeoneer) traversing 3 levels of rooms full of traps, eccentric characters, evil monsters, and imagination. I am into Dungeons and Dragons type board games, so this show won me over big time courtesy of Youtube. I have nearly seen all the episodes that were aired and watching just one episode was enough to make me watch another and then another until I found a winning team (only 8 teams succeeded in the history of the show). The characters will stick with you forever such as Folly the Jester, Mordred the Wizard, Oakley the Tree Troll, Gundrada the warrior woman, Brother Mace, Smirkenorff the Dragon, Sylvester Hands, Ah Wok, and Lord Fear himself. The monsters the dungeoneer encountered were kind of scary a few of them bordering on frightening, such as the Catacombite and the Brollochan, despite dated special effects. Of the 8 seasons of this show, my favorites are seasons 2 and 7 since they have the most amount of winning teams. Now if only BBC America could air this wonderful show....

Every Friday afternoon at 4:30pm I was in front of the TV watching this show without fail. It was innovative, original, captivating and what made it stand out from other kids quiz shows at the time was its level of difficulty, very few teams completed it during its 8 series. When a team got to the promised third level you began to get excited and think, they might do it. The use of CGI was ahead of its time and having the dungeoneer having to be guided by his/her team was simply genius. Onto the host, Treguard was one of the most memorable characters on kids television, Hugo Wyatt played him perfectly and his evolution from a neutral character to outright protagonist matched the times and the good verses evil element added to the show and give the quest a sense of purpose. Lord Fear the main villain was an inspired addition and viewers wondered, what is he going to do now when he appeared, and he and Treguard are some of the most enduring images of my childhood. Another thing which made this show great was it wasn't sanitized, parts of it were frightening, it wasn't easy to complete and it actually challenged children which is what made it so captivating. Anyway I will always look on this show with nothing but fond memories, and hope for future generations shows like it can be produced.

I have weird memories of this show. Like many childhood shows that go unseen for many years afterwards, time fogs the memory and the fondness that we look back on simpler times tend to infect other things we remember from the same period. For Knightmare my memory is also touched by the fact that for years my mother strongly disapproved of her children watching this show. A Northern Ireland Protestant woman, anything that suggest the occult, witchcraft, spells and so on was to be frowned upon so the idea of children being sent into a world of dragons, skulls, spells and so on was clearly not going to be anything suitable for kids.However we did watch it anyway with her occasional tut-tutting in the background and generally it was pretty enjoyable stuff. Nowadays the special effects will look ridiculous and even at the time they weren't brilliant but they were still pretty good for the time. The idea of the show was basically Dungeons and Dragons. Of a team of children, one would don a helmet that covered their eyes totally and wandered off into a green-screen room, while the rest of the team stay with the Dungeon Master and watch on a TV that is where the effects are added. Considering it was in the mid 1980's, it was actually pretty smart and innovative to set a gameshow in a virtual world. Sure it was clunky and the performances of the actors playing the various goblins etc were mostly hammy as hell but it worked for a kids audience mainly by virtue of being different and imaginative in concept and delivery.It would probably be terrible rubbish if I tried to watch it now, but then why would I watch it now? Of its time so it was and the fact that I remember it clearly as something that I enjoyed showed how well orientated to its target audience it was and how effective it was even if eight seasons of it was probably pushing its luck!

Who didn't want to be on Knightmare???? Everyone I know who was a kid in the 80's wanted to be on it. Although not many applied as no one ever wanted to wear the helmet. The classic lines of "where am I?" that followed the entry into every room by the contestant's. "Temporal disruption imminent!" That preceded the end of the show. "Enter stranger" which invited the new contestants in. For the time it was really advanced and had everything a kid needed in a TV program it made you think (with it's riddles) it made you shout at the people involved "No not there! there's a spider" and last but not least the feeling of adventure!!! It looks a little tired now with dodgy CGI but it's still my favourite show from when i was a kid.