...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.
Review of Knightriders
