Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

I bought this DVD after thinking about it for a few weeks and was not expecting much,.. and basically that is what I got out of it. This movie must have been filmed in Spain a number of years ago. It was funny like a Monty Python type of movie. Harvey Kitel must be willing to appear in almost any type of film. The quality was really poor, the Alien and his Dragon spaceship I suppose were different from recent Alien movies I watch, he was a spaceman who resembled David Bowie. It was really a dumb movie. If you are not expecting a blockbuster movie and really like spanish directors, actors, producers and scenery, and please do not compare with any King Authur Knight movies,... check it out, like I say it is like a Monty Python movie.

The film is a faiure as normal entertainment for normal people. But I am glad it is now on DVD and will not be forgotten. You may appreciate it if you are a very particular type of person with particular cerebral ways of looking at things.

The premise is really delicious and there are three great actors to watch interacting. So that might interest you. Then there is the question of why it failed. If you like to puzzle artistic/commercial mistakes of differences in cultural artistic receptions then it may interest you.

The premise of the story is great. Do you know the saying, "When a pickpocket looks at a saint all he sees is the saint's pockets"? This psychological fact of how we see the world through personal filters is taken to a creative extreme in this film. If you are not sensitive to this flaw in human nature, this film may not resonate with you at all.

An alien vehicle crashes in the middle ages. The knight sees it as some sort of dragon that he must fight. The cleric sees it as an evil spirit. The Alchemist/philosopher sees it in his terms.

Then they all try to deal with it additionally in terms of the power struggles between them. And of course the middle ages was characterized by power struggles and alliances between the military class, the church, and men of "reason" or primitive "pre-science."

If you think of it this way you may find a lot of cute tongue in cheek humor in their interactions. It is three blind men running their hands over an elephant and fighting with each other at the same time. In this sense it is an interesting way to comment on human nature by using an outlandish fictional device.

So how could they fail? For one thing they try to ham it up too much in my opinion as though they had no faith that the audience could find the humor in in on their own. Fair enough. But for me at least the hamming it up did not work. The dialogue and acting are commonly stilted as though that will make it funny, but it comes across as poor quality. Several voices are dubbed and that may be part of the problem. Harvey Keitel makes little if any effort to cover his New York accent.This is supposed to remind us that this is a comedy?

In fairness, I really think that for most people it actually would not have been clear that this was meant to be a sarcastic commentary on human stupidity unless the producers tried to make it into a rather obvious comedy.

I imagine that if Bunuel or Almodovar had done this they would have let the humor speak for itself, but either can get away with that for several reasons.

I bought the VHS for $1 back when out of curiosity and it was indeed a curiosity. The box says that it was directed by Spanish director Fernando Colomo. I don't know his other many films, but I would guess that he is one of those Spanish directors then experimenting with surrealism in film. The Spanish appreciate surrealism in film more than Americans do. These sorts of artistic experiments are interesting to me, even when I don't find them entertaining. I see that he has won some awards and that some of his films have gotten high Amazon ratings. Several are not availabe in zone 1, so probably he is better known in Europe.

It also seems that unless you are an American who is a history buff, the comic aspects of people with different world views fighting and trying awkwardly to work together might not jump out at you with force.

I see in this film a director who was willing to take some chances and I would be curious find out more about how his career developed.

I doubt that many viewers will find this film entertaining. But if you can be forgiving of experimental films with awkward aspects you might just find this film worth watching. I give it an A for concept, a B for effort and a D if I try to imagine watching it from the perspective of the average American viewer, unless he has found some drugs that I can't think of.