Teen Knight (1998)

Posted on Jun 05, 2002 under "Cold", Fantasy, Kidvid |

Directed by Phil Comeau
Written by Antony Anderson
Starring
- Kristopher Lemche
- Caterina Scorsone
- Benjamin Plener
- Paul Soles
- Kimberly Pullis

In his senior year at our high school, my friend Dan Robins and the rest of the yearbook geeks had a great idea: they created an artificial person. Laura Turner, to be precise. They got her name and bio into the senior class in the yearbook (”picture unavailable,” naturally), as well as in several clubs and extra-curricular organizations. They even managed to get several poems attributed to her included in the arts pages — all of them about the nothingness of the self. They didn’t have a real goal in mind, but they knew that they had achieved something great when one of the local papers called to track her down for an Education Page interview.

Why do I bring this up? Because I believe that the powers that be at the Kushner-Locke Company have pulled the same stunt with this movie. To wit, I firmly disbelieve the existence of “Antony Anderson,” credited here as the screenwriter. I refuse to believe that an actual person could commit to paper such a hopeless mess. In fact, I more than half-suspect that there was no actual script for this production, and everything was made up as they went along. After all, if you see a conglomerated mess of non sequiturs, pointless plot threads, and general storytelling gibberish, would you more easily believe that the whole thing was extemporaneous, or that someone actually planned it to be that way?

Visine-G: Gets the green out.

Long ago in hastily-sketched medieval times, there was an evil Lord Raykin (Marc Robinson, looking more than a little like Richard Grieco) who wanted to take over the kingdom of good King William while he was off on a campaign. However, since his entire attack force appears to have been himself and his wizard Eruik (Claudiu Trandafir — say, what country was this shot in?), he gets apprehended by the palace guards. His wizard gets them out of the dungeon by mind control, though, and once out he uses his magical powers to change the crest above the castle gate from two horses (William’s coat of arms) to two dragons (Raykin’s). This, he says, will give them power to… um… call up the castle for one day. I swear, that’s what he says. Five minutes into the movie, and already, I’m lost.

Cut to the present day. Silver Streak Cola is having a contest in which the winner will get a Medieval Mansion Adventure, a complete knights ‘n’ armor recreation thingie. Our hero, Peter (Kristopher Lemche), loves the idea, and guzzles Silver Streak like there’s no tomorrow. He has no success, though, until his wizardlike neighbor, a retired antiques dealer named Mr. Percy (Paul Soles), somehow engineers it that Peter gets a winning bottle cap.

So Peter’s off to the castle, which just happens to be the King William’s castle, but brought over (supposedly) to America block by block. There he meets the other winners — geeky Benjamin (Benjamin Plener), spoiled rich kid Tommy (Dan Fintescu, and congratulations on having the worst haircut in the movie, kid), and Alison (Caterina Scorsone), who never really gets a role — at first she’s a hanger-on to Tommy, but you never figure out if they came together, or if she’s rich too, or what. (Hell, it was halfway through to movie before anyone even mentioned her name.)

“So — you’re Henry the Eighth, you are?”

There’s also a film crew on hand to document the fun for Silver Streak, centered on blonde reporter Claudia (Kimberly Pullis), who may be the worst actor on the premises. Although it’s hard to tell. Seriously, everyone’s lines are lame enough that not a soul sounds like the speak English as a mother tongue. (Although it’s pretty clear tha a surprising number of actors were actually Romanian, and probably got dubbed stateside.)

And the owner/proprietor of the establishment is named Wiggins (Eugen Cristea), who gives the kids a tour that includes the revelation that the entire place is staffed with robots. So thus far, what we’ve got is the bastard child of Westworld and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Well, I hope you’ve all enjoyed what little sense everything has made so far, because it’s all going bye-bye. In the middle of the night, Wiggins sees Raykin and Eruik hanging around in the courtyard; we’re now in the past! They hypnotize him and take him prisoner.

Why? Apparently, so that the kids and the reporting crew can wander around the next morning for twenty minutes, wondering where everyone is: No robots, no Wiggins, no power, no phones. (Boy, I’m glad we introduced that “robots” storyline so that it could promptly disappear.) Peter does discover Wiggins’ remote computer pad with a verbose vocal chip, but then that runs out of batteries. Nope, guess we won’t follow that plot thread either.

“Richard Greico? You really think so?”

Instead, Peter and Benjamin get one backup generator going in time to find out that the entire castle is now in the year 1383 (how’s the computer know that? and for that matter, how did Peter get the computer to tell him that in under ten keystrokes?). Meanwhile, Raykin is capturing Tommy and Alison. And then they go and feed the dragon.

Ah yes, the dragon. Because dragons were common fixtures during historical times like 1383, didn’t you know? In the rebuilt castle of the present, there’s just a mechanical head in a cave just outside the front gate. But now, there’s a for-real dragon there, which Raykin drugs with a dosed pig carcass so that he can get in and out of the castle. And then he falls for Claudia the reporter girl and abducts her back to his own castle.

Meanwhile, Peter and Benjamin have discovered the old jailor still minding the dungeon, who leads them to a secret room, where the old wizard Perceval, Eruik’s old teacher, is imprisoned. Yes, this Percival is obviously the same vaguely Einsteinesque person as Mr. Percy in the future. No, Peter doesn’t seem to notice at all. And no, there’s no point to it. (By the way, actor Paul Soles did play Albert Einstein in a TV movie a couple of years previous. And for what it’s worth, he was also the voice of Peter Parker in the classic Spider-Man cartoon of the ’60s.)

Then there’s a whole bunch of stuff about the crest over the gate, which makes absolutely no sense to me. Raykin knows it down with a four-foot catapult andcarts it back to his place, and Peter and friends have to rescue Tommy from Raykin’s castle or else the good guy’s castle will stay in the past, and they need the crest for something, so they have to climb down a ladder past the dragon to get to Raykin’s castle (there’s a wall all the way around the freaking castle — why the hell do you have to put the ladder twelve feet from the dragon’s hole?), and after that doesn’t work, then they go to plan B, which is that Percival talks to the dragon, who is his old friend, and is more than happy to let them pass. No, that’s not even presented as funny; it’s just more stalling to make sure that we get our full 90 minutes of agony here. Aargh…

“I’m too sexy for this flick, too sexy for this shtick…”

I’m not doing a good job of relaying the muddled mess, am I? That’s because huge sections of my brain shut down during watching for self-defense. I started playing with loose threads on the couch and reciting the multiplication tables because they were more amusing. I only sat up when Raykin taunts one of his prisoners, saying, “Unless, of course, you would like me to put an end to your misery now.” Raykin, alas, did not notice me waving my arms and pleading for such a merciful release. And yet, unlike just about everything else ever released by Full Moon Releasing, this movie doesn’t end short. No, we get a full hour and a half of putridity.

Gee, what else? Well, in the middle of it all, we waste ten minutes for Percival to teach Benjamin magic, and in the end Eruik and Percival have a lame wizard’s battle of sorts (everything short of “Now I am the master, Obi-Wan!”), and there’s some terrible swordfighting with Raykin, and then they get the crest put back on the castle and change it back to horses, and then they’re back in the present.

Nothing made sense. Not a thing. Rich boy Tommy? He has a couple of pointlessly antagonistic scenes and then disappears as a prisoner. Reporter girl Claudia? Annoys people, then gets captured when Raykin takes a shine to her. The magic the wizards use seems to change rules from moment to moment. And why the hell does Raykin still want to rule the castle specifically, when there’s not a damned soul there? Not a damned lick of it made sense. It was as if, as part of a bizarre bet, all involved in the production were perversely, intentionally trying to make sure that it was incomprehensible — it certainly seems worse than pure chance and garden-variety incompetence could account for.

“I shoulda stayed a patent clerk!”

Do you want to know the only good thing about this movie? The dragon. It looked pretty good. Really good, actually; as good as, say, test footage for DragonHeart. But if the rest of the movie annoys the viewer like a persistent itch (and not just a normal itch, but an itchy rash that doesn’t stop itching when you scratch it, it just gets sore on top of the itch), then the decision to hire a CGI techie over an actual writer was the wrong idea.

Let me explain it to all those professionals in low-budget-land who still haven’t gotten it: MAKE SURE THE SCRIPT IS GOOD. Sure, the box art is what they rent it for — but especially in the case of a branded “Pulsepounders!” movie like this one, having an exceedingly sucky story only makes sure that your next movie won’t be picked up off the rental shelves. You’ve just screwed yourself over; you’ve made sure that the movie you poured into this movie will be wasted and work against you, all because you could be bothered to wait an extra month for a screenplay that didn’t suck green weenies.

If you want to see it in this light, actually, then this movie is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Because if it had been me in the director’s chair, the movie would never have been seen. Halfway through editing, when I couldn’t retreat deeply enough into denial to ignore the fact that the movie I had just made wasn’t worth the toilet paper that the crew used while making it, I honestly would have used a 9mm to paint my brains across the wall rather than finish the thing and have my name attached.

Yes, it’s just that bad.