You haven’t truly suffered until you’ve survived at least one Minnesota winter. Between the stifling sub-zero temperatures (coldest day for me so far is -67) and the copious amounts of snow (Minnesota averages over 60 inches per winter) you re left with a perfect storm of winter wonderland that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, let alone myself. Yet year after year I am somehow still content to remain in the frozen wasteland that is Minneapolis and suffer not all that silently.
Take for instance today, as we here in Minnesota are currently being hit by our second major storm … of the week. To add insult to injury, this previous weekend it was 40 degrees outside, offering a bit of an unusual respite for all of us. Unfortunately, that warm weather resulted in a rain storm yesterday, and when the thermometer dropped well below zero over the evening, you can imagine the result. But wait, the joke isn’t finished. You see due to the relatively balmy weather I incorrectly assumed that my car would be fine and I wouldn’t need to start it during the night. But when I woke up to a temperature of -18 (not including the lovely 30 mph winds) I ran into a bit of a problem when I tried to head to work at 5am.
Sure enough the car wouldn’t start, and as an added bonus all the doors were frozen shut so it took me five minutes just to get into the thing so I could find out the fruits of my labor were thoroughly spoiled. Thus I was left with no further option but to awaken the sleeping giant, Anna.
Oh sure she wasn’t happy having to drive me to work, and knowing that the temperature wasn’t supposed to climb for at least another two days meant we might have to repeat this dreaded ordeal a few more times during the week. Since that idea didn’t exactly fly with the little lady, we decided to finally buy some jumper cables in the hopes we could get my noble steed up and running. I mean, without that I was continually at the mercy of my fair maiden coming to my rescue, and that is simply unacceptable.
Klever (Harvey Keitel) is desperate to become a knight so that he might win the affections of Princess Alba (Maria Lamor). When she is kidnapped by a dragon, Klever thinks he might finally have been given his chance at impressing her. But what if Princess Alba has no interest in returning to her kingdom? And what if it wasn’t a dragon that kidnapped her, but a space ship?
Star Knight is one of dozens of genre mashups that appeared during the early 80′s and entertained blossoming nerds like myself for hours on end. While nearly all were unceremoniously ignored in the theatre, more then a few survived and even flourished on home video much to my enjoyment. But Star Knight was not one of the success stories and it takes all of about five minutes to discover why. You see, one of the keys to the successful genre mashup is that they might realize they are ridiculous, but they never try to make the audience feel ridiculous for watching them. Star Knight, unfortunately, never seemed to have gotten this memo.
What’s strange about this is that Star Knight seemingly has all the ingredients in place for a successful film. The premise of a starship pilot being mistaken for a dragon riding knight is both interesting and ripe with possibilities, but Star Knight rarely capitalizes on its great setup. The plot stays surprisingly flat throughout the film, and even the few tangents that are hinted at are quickly dropped for seemingly no reason. And sure enough, at every moment when the story is written into the slightest corner, a deus ex machina magically appears to help lurch the story back onto the tracks. As far as basic plotting and character development go, Star Knight is as weak as the awful dubbing.
While the plot of Star Knight is less then exciting, it is practically exhilarating compared to the stagnant and oppressive dialogue. In an effort to make the film sound “authentic”, screen writers Andreu Martín and Miguel Ángel Nieto decided to include all manner of superfluous ye’s and thy’s. In response the actors seem increasingly flustered by the dialog, and they often times appear to be struggling to remember the oddly ridiculous jargon completely lacking in rhyme or reason rather then focusing their efforts on acting. This creates an impressively unbalanced script that blockades any narrative flow due to the obvious struggles in delivering every sentence. The entire process would be humorous if it wasn’t so unwieldy and effective at inducing headaches for the viewer.
Of course, it could be argued that the dialog would work quite well if the actors actually cared about their performances. The enigmatic Klaus Kinski appears to be the only one even passably invested, though I’m sure that has something to do with him being the sole person in the majority of his scenes. That allows for the fewest opportunities that another actor might step on his lines, genius or sociopathic tendencies.
Of particular note is Keitel’s performance, which is so impressively awful it is amazing that it isn’t now considered legendary. Initially, you would think Keitel had found a plum little role. One that would allow him to seethe in that recognizable Keitel way as a man desperate to become a knight so that he might win the respect of his colleagues and the hand of the princess. But as the film progresses, and it becomes more and more obvious that Klever is supposed to be a shallow and facile character, that Keitel was horribly cast. And as the scenes tick away it soon becomes painfully evident that Keitel probably hadn’t been given the role that he believed he had signed up for. Klever increasingly becomes a one-note joke, that off a buffoon and a dunce, and as the story progresses Keitel’s performance becomes increasingly lethargic, resulting in action sequences that might as well have been performed underwater, and dialogue delivered as if Keitel was lazily reading it off of a cue card.
But while Keitel’s listless performance is the most obvious to point out, he is hardly the only actor who seems confounded by the material. The actors seem to universally think that they are in a serious period piece, not in a straight to video sci-fi/fantasy genre mashup, and until the Knight of the Dragon (Miguel Bosé) is revealed there is little evidence that the actors are in any way mistaken. But starting in the second act of the film, things begin to take a rather odd turn.
Let me give a quick synopsis of what occurs once the princess is kidnapped by the dragon. First, the drincess and the Dragon Knight, let’s call him IX and have him only speak in musical tones for nonsense’s sake, immediately fall in love. This poses a problem; for IX can’t breathe oxygen and Princess Alba can’t travel with him for fear of being tested on like a lab rat. The Princess takes IX to see the alchemist Boecius (Kinski) in the hopes that he will have an answer to their problem. He doesn’t. But he does somehow gain possession of a magical orb that causes him to hallucinate how to create an elixir that grants everlasting life. This elixir is composed of liquid gold and nothing else. Klever and the priest Lupo (Fernando Rey), who both happen to be jealous of Boecius’ sway with the Princess, convince the King that the Princess really loves Klever and that Boecius is a Satanist. They do this by telling him this. The King, powerless to resist statements, believes them. Thus they break into Boecius’ lab, capture him, and then proceed to perform a Medieval version of “Who is on first!”
Klever: (Reading a parchment) So how do I steal his armor?
Lupo: You must read the instructions in reverse.
Klever: (Flipping the parchment upside down and backwards) How do I steal his armor?
Lupo: Clever. (Flips parchment back) But not like that. You must read the opposite of the words on the parchment.
Klever: I don’t understand. How doth I capture his armor?
Lupo: heaven means Hell. Angels mean demons. That is how you will know.
Klever: …
Klever: So how does thy steal his armor?
It was at this moment when I realized that Star Knight was desperately trying to be a comedy. It all went downhill from there. With each successive act Star Knight would undergo a massive tonal shift, connecting the arcs by the thinnest of threads, and the end result was disastrous.
Klever, who in the first act was the unlikely hero, transformed in act two into the villain, but by act three was now the clueless comic relief. So inept that he somehow manages to hit himself with a mace during battle, and foolish enough to challenge an entire starship to single combat. This unnecessary shift has a detrimental effect on all the previous material as well. For example, if Klever and Lupo are such blundering buffoons, then how were they every satisfactory villains? And if they are truly marginal villains, then why were Princess Alba and IX so terrified of them in the first place? And if the princess and IX had nothing to be frightened of, then what was the point of the entire movie? For all the self-proclaimed bravado, Star Knight ends up being nothing more then an exercise in futility. Even worse, the final act misfires to badly that the film begins to outright mock genre conventions, seemingly in an attempt to ridicule those who enjoy these films, and who also are the ones watching Star Knight.
And to add insult to injury, I couldn’t even take solace in Star Knight’s claims that a hero never really has to do anything; he only requires a noble steed and a shiny coat of armor to fool commoners into believing him to be something special. For you see when Anna and I tried to jump start my car last night we discovered that is had been so cold out that the hood’s hinges were frozen tight, leaving us unable to even open the hood to get to the battery and resuscitate my car. Thus we are at the mercy of the elements, as only a dramatic rise in temperature could save us now.
The forecast for tomorrow? Negative 6 with scattered snow storms, and it isn’t supposed to reach twenty degrees until Christmas Eve.
Bugger.
