Knightriders (1981)

You know how sometimes you’ll be driving around listening to Bruce Springsteen and the third act of one of the longer songs about the shattered American dream will kick in, everybody in the song either at death’s door or doomed to spend the rest of their life in the purgatory of having peaked young, and something about Bruce’s voice contrasted against the hue of the sky will catch you right in whatever part of the soul that makes you weep for what you yourself have left unrealized? George A. Romero’s Knightriders is like that, but about a renaissance fair circuit built around the spectacle of motorcycle jousting.

It’s a spectacular movie, earnest and dorky and brutally sad, finding the Camelot willed into being by Ed Harris’ King Billy on the verge of unraveling. Crooked cops hassle his shows, townies try to trash their shit, everyone is tempted to sell out, and the king has a death wish that’s becoming harder and harder to ignore. Knightriders is Romero’s eighth movie, his follow-up to the absurdly successful Dawn of the Dead, and while it has the hallmarks of an action vehicle — reckless and impressive motorcycle stunts, chaotic crowd scenes reminiscent of Dawn‘s zombie piefight sequence — it is a surprisingly poignant meditation on the pressures of making art in a capitalist society.

Not all of it works — as sick as he looks, the introduction of an indigenous knight is mostly an excuse for the third act to take on the guise of a vision quest — but for the most part Romero’s earnestness is Knightrider‘s strength. Working, as he often did, with his usual troupe, he bends the chivalric overtones of Arthurian legend around the goofy and frequently fruitless enterprise of making something. Art, he argues, is a utopian endeavor, something few people understand and even fewer are ready to realize. It’s a big swing to take in a movie where Tom Savini does a photoshoot in a codpiece, but doing so allows him to further explore familiar themes from his horror movies, like the way race works in America, while widening his scope to a surprisingly tender portrayal of someone coming out as gay. Also Stephen King plays Philly Boy Roy, and that’s got to count for something.