Abominable Advent Calendar Day 15: Star Knight (1985)
Crapsterpiece Category: Big-Budget Bombs
Heads up: bad accents, lost-in-translation humor
Medieval alchemist Boetius (Klaus Kinski, in a slightly less demented performance than usual) performs a summoning ritual and a light appears in the sky. The villagers mistake it for a dragon, but in fact it’s an alien spaceship. Headstrong Princess Alba (Maria Lamor) escapes from the castle, her father, and forced matrimony, past the world’s most annoying bridge guard, and nearly drowns in the lake where the spaceship is hiding. She’s saved by the alien, Ix (Miguel Bose), and they fall in love, despite the fact that he doesn’t speak (except via telepathic pictures) and can’t take off his space suit or he’ll die. Klever (Harvey Keitel), who is not at all clever, is a soldier who wants to marry Alba and become a knight, and he decides he must defeat the alien and the dragon. Boetius befriends Ix and helps him prepare to fight Klever for Alba’s hand.
Let’s start with the good: the visuals in this movie are great at times. The spaceship is gorgeous. The setting is beautiful, and the costuming and art direction are, too, if not historically accurate. And Fernando Rey is a hoot as the friar.
The rest, however, is a hot mess. There’s a lot of attempted humor that just doesn’t work or is lost in translation (the film was made in Spain). Small pieces of well-known myths and stories are scattered throughout the film—shades of Gawain and the Green Knight; more than a little bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail—but seeing these familiar things makes the story even more disjointed. Suspension of disbelief becomes even more difficult every time Keitel is onscreen, because he never loses his New York accent. Instead of a knight preparing to fight a dragon, he sounds like he’s cleaning up a murder for Vincent Vega.
That said, this particular trainwreck, with its creative clash of ideas, is entertaining in a good-bad way. Sit back and enjoy the pretty visuals, wonder if Klaus Kinski is going to come unglued and punch someone, and try to puzzle out what’s going on, or what might have been if it were just a little bit better.
