Star Knight

STAR KNIGHT (EL CABALLERO DEL DRAGON, 1985) is a Spanish science fiction film set in the Middle Ages, directed by Fernando Colomo and starring Klaus Kinski, Harvey Keitel and Fernando Rey. It's an oddity that has somehow always been lurking around on various public domain video labels on both VHS and DVD. Woe to the determined Kinski completist.

Keitel plays Klever, a servant to the Count of Rue who lusts after his boss's incessantly nagging daughter, Alba. Klever, whose other goal is to secure a knighthood, has also vowed to slay the "dragon" that has been terrorizing the countryside. All this "terrorizing" is done offscreen and it's soon revealed that the dragon is in fact an alien spaceship on some sort of goat-collecting mission. One afternoon Alba gets fed up with something or another and decides to sneak out of the castle and go skinny dipping in a nearby lake. It just so happens that the goat collector has parked his camper at the bottom of the lake. When he gets an eyeful of Alba, the goats suddenly don't seem so appealing, so he decides to add her to his collection. Alba is soon giving the handsome alien, who she calls IX, an earful of her nagging ("Do something! Don't you love me?! Well prove it! Don't touch me with those awful gloves!" and on and on...).

Of course Klever is filled with jealousy and after discovering a way of removing IX's invincible armor, he challenges the alien to a duel. Suddenly IX seems to have second thoughts and releases Alba from the ship. Any sane alien would take his goats and head home, but IX sticks around and risks it all for the love, or whatever, of a mortal earthling.

What about Kinski you ask? Well, until the big cast reunion at the end, Kinski might as well be in an entirely different movie. The advantage of this is that his movie is actually photographed better and he doesn't have to embarrass himself by being in the same scenes as the miserable Keitel or the incredibly annoying Alba. Kinski plays an alchemist who is searching for the "secret of secrets," the elixir of human life, that will make him immortal. Of course IX hears about this and just gives it to him, saving the magician years of toiling away in his basement lab boiling poop and berries.

Keitel, who is one of the few actors to do his own dubbing, performs his entire role with a heavy New York accent. His part seems to be the only one which was written with faux-Shakespearean dialogue (at one point he actually says, "Are ye talking to me?"), making him seem even more ridiculous than he already is. The one exception to all the awfulness, performance wise, is Kinski, who in spite of being dubbed by another actor actually puts some effort into what little he has to work with. He seems to be the only actor that wasn't told he was appearing in a comedy, so while Keitel and Rey perform pratfalls and ancient Abbott & Costello routines, Kinski actually comes out of this train wreck with a little dignity. Kinski's scenes seem to have had a little extra care put into them by the technical crew, and some of them are quite atmospheric and attractive. A few of the locations are striking and some of the earlier scenes have some nicely photographed scenery, but the remainder of the movie is dominated by cheesy special effects and out of place desert locations.

--MW