Directed by: George A. Romero
Starring: Ed Harris, Gary Lahti, Tom Savini
George A. Romero, famous for The Night of the Living Dead and other movies in that ‘series’, decided to break out of his normal pattern of kinda creepy movies with a kinda interesting plot device to make Knightriders, a story about a renaissance festival with motorcycle jousting, which manages to stay interesting for about fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, this is a two and a half hour long movie. Sigh…
The movie goes behind the scenes of an interesting festival attraction: a troupe of people who dress up in tinfoil armor and joust against each other while riding motorcycles. It turns out that the ‘king’ of the group (Harris), is totally insane, and believes that his little act is a revival of chivalry and good intentions or something, and over the course of the movie, his group realizes how insane he is and slowly split up, only to join back together at the end, because… they… uh… something.
This plot is all fine and good, but the worst part about this movie is that the actual motorcycle jousting takes up about two hours of the total runtime, and there really isn’t a whole lot of different things you can do with motorcycle jousting after the first fifteen minutes or so. It’s just the same thing over and over again, and in between we get to see everyone bickering and Ed Harris devouring scenery as he basically shouts “I AM A CRAZY MAN!!!” Romero should’ve stuck to zombies.
I guess if you like Nascar or watching golf or something then this movie could be entertaining for you, but I just don’t get the appeal of watching guys ride around in motorcycles for hours, even if they are dressed in stupid outfits.
Films in Boxes 
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