KNIGHTS

The evil cyborgs are led by one Job, played by Lance Henriksen.

If you only know Henrikson from his lead role in the Millennium TV series and as Bishop, the android in Aliens, then you’d be expecting an understated performance bordering on the somnambulant. Well, then you haven’t seen him in either this 1993 movie or as the white-suited villain in the John Woo/Jean Claude van Damme vehicle Hard Target (also 1993!).

Our Lance can be quite the ham, and his acting here is really, really wildly over-the-top. For some reason Henrikson decided that literally spewing copious amounts of spittle would be a good performance choice. Eww gross!

At the beginning of the movie a group of said survivors is killed off by the evil cyborg baddies. A small girl manages to escape and to grow up as Kathy Long, “five-time kickboxing champion” as the DVD back cover informs one. Naturally she vows revenge and is later fortunate enough to be saved and trained to kill cyborgs by a “good” cyborg named Gabriel who bears an uncanny resemblance to a well-known Country & Western singer with acting pretensions.

It would seem that Gabriel was designed to kill all the bad cyborgs by the same “Creator” who designed and built the bad cyborgs – as if to erase the mistake he had made (can’t someone erase this movie instead?). Some more thought should have gone into this since there are “hundreds” of the evil cyborgs (in one funny scene Job recounts how the hundreds of cyborgs are going to over-run the entire planet, heh-heh), but only one of Gabriel.

Anyhow, not to let logic get in the way of what passes as the plot. Later on, the Kathy Long character infiltrates the enemy cyborg camp and picks them off one by one in a standoff. Except now there only seems to be a handful of them, and not the “hundreds” mentioned earlier on.

The climax is one long yawn-inducing and seemingly endless martial arts sequence of the “hey, there’s like twenty of us and only two of them, so instead of us storming them all at once and overwhelming them, let’s fight them one by one and get picked off one by one in the process” variety. At this point my wife fell asleep (sleep will come as a mercy in this movie!) and woke up a bit later on only to find out that they were still fighting. “Blah blah blah blah,” she intoned. My sentiments exactly.

If the words boredom and cyborgs ring a bell, then it’s because they are synonymous with the director Albert Pyun (does it rhyme with pain?), whose other movies such as Nemesis and Cyborg should be banned under the Geneva Convention or something . . .

THE DISC: In addition to South Africa having one of the worst crime rates in the world and suffering from grinding poverty and social inequality, it is probably the only country in the world where you can find Knights on DVD! You don’t know how many sleepless nights (no pun intended) this is causing me.

And no, I’m not being sarcastic. I’ve surfed all over the web and good luck finding this movie on DVD anywhere else on the planet (e-mail me if your country also has the dubious distinction of having Knights available on DVD – maybe we can start a club or something). You’ll only find it on VHS elsewhere.

This DVD comes compliments of Next Video, and I wanted to publish their details here for their own Little Corner of Internet Shame, except then I remembered that they are also the local distributors of the excellent cult fave Donnie Darko.

Presented in full screen (probably transferred from the masters used to produce videotape copies) the sound and image isn’t too bad. Better than VHS I suppose – after all, have you ever tried playing Frisbee with a VHS tape?

The menu however is the worst I’ve ever seen on a DVD (and that includes those quickie jobbies done on Malaysian pirate discs!) – amateurish and cheap-looking it has one static screen with a Play option and scene access right below it (the chapters are presented as “Scene 1”, “Scene2” and so forth – I kid you not!)

WORTH IT? To review Knights for this Web site I wanted to rent a copy of it, but couldn’t find a video store that stocked it (I guess those video store owners are cleverer than we give them credit for) so – the horror! the sheer unadulterated horror! – I actually bought a copy from a bargain bin at one of our major local supermarket retailers!

RECOMMENDATION: Being the paragon of good taste that I am, the idea of someone finding Knights nestled between Psycho Santa and Hercules in New York in my DVD collection is just plain scary. So tell you what: mail me a cool SF movie you’d like reviewed on this web site and I’ll mail you Knights in turn and that way you can boast how you are only of a handful of people on this planet who actually own this movie on DVD (and with good reason too – but never mind!) . . .

Contact me at scifimoviepage@yahoo.com if you're masochistic, I mean, interested . . .

NOTE: Since writing this review, I've actually received quite a few requests for this DVD! Did anyone out there actually read the review!? Sigh . . . anyway, if you're interested in obtaining a copy I can still help you. Even if you don't have a DVD to swap I can still send you a copy in exchange for an Amazon.com gift voucher to the value of $US25 (this includes handling & postage costs).
 

• See also: Cold Fusion Video Reviews.