Die Abenteuer der Delta Ritter

I just want to inform some people that Robert A. Heinlein wrote a wonderful novel called CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY. It is one of my favorite science fiction novels.

However, I am annoyed by the movie QUEST OF THE never mind I don't even feel like completing the title.

Why do I mention it?

When I first saw this on MST3K, I saw so many things that had apparently been lifted right out of the beginning of CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY: The slave boy in bandages purchased by the beggar who turns out to really be a spy... At the auction scene, the beggar even does the same thing in his bidding--he bids a certain number, but several denominations of currency lower than expected, and is sold the slave after all because nobody else wants him.

To those who said there were some neat things that could have been done with this movie, I say read Heinlein's CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY.

I saw this film on MST3K, and can really not add that much to what has already been said. This movie really is that bad, and incredibly historically inaccurate. It also rips off Citizen of the Galaxy with the whole "beggar/spy-in-foreign-land-buys-slave-boy-for-secret-society -and-gives-him-special-training" I'd also like to point out that they not only filmed a renfest in Northern California for the medieval/renaissance/whatever setting, but the exterior of the Ancient Greece scene was apparently filmed in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts. The guys really do suck at crafting a story or directing, but I've got to give them credit original cheap sets solutions. They're Ed Woodian in their ingenuity!

GASP! at the amazing bad acting. FLINCH! at the horrible in-jokiness of it all (Leonard from the village of Vinci?!?). Yes, it's Sword & Sorcery as you never wanted to see it. It's probably Warner's worst movie (beating out Naked Souls), and possibly his worse performance, but he's just not given much to work with here. Sarah Douglas is suitably evil (can't go wrong there), but even she seems overwhelmed by the sheer hokiness of it all. The rest of the cast seems to be out-of-work SCA members. There's just nothing, nothing good about this.

...there was a production company that wanted to make a sword-and-sorcery flick on a shoestring budget. So they hired out a California Rennaisance Festival and had the extras wander around in front of the merchant shops, and used them for the backdrop of an unoriginal story about a kid, a whore, and Leonardo daVinci (I am SO not making this up) off to find a bunch of junk Archimedes left lying around after the fall of Rome.

Of course, it fails spectacularly. It fails even more spectacularly if you're actually involved in RenFest or SCA-type activities, because then you can tell that the costumes on the extras come from about fifteen different time periods and locations. And that nobody, no not even the Vikings, wore horns on their helmets the way the Vulchare's henchmen do. And that nobody PERIOD would have dressed in the EFX-chorus costumes they stuck Olivia Hussey and David Warner (as Vulchare) into.

The painful segments of this film are innumerable. Such as the pee-throwing scene. Or "advanced" spy techniques employed by the Delta Knights, which involve meteorlogical discussions and that writing-with-lemon-juice-on-paper-and-heating-it-to-reveal-secret-message trick that children's science shows always do. Or Richard Kind in an annoying cameo and possibly the worst fake beard in film history (yes, even counting the wool on Captain Santa's face in Space Mutiny). Or the way the whore solicits the kid for sex even though he's not old enough to shave. Or the guys who wear Halloween masks and live in a summer camp obsticale course, one of whom screams "I'M COMMMIIIIIIIIIIING!" in what sounds for all the world like Cheech Marin's voice. Or the notion that Leonardo wasn't a genius, he was an irritating schmuck who stole all his ideas from Archimedes.

The MST3K version, of course, is priceless. I highly recommend it--it will ease the pain.

It's nice to see the SCA people getting more work. In fact, they get a huge amount of work in this cheesy quasi-medieval movie, playing all the extras and even some of the principals.

The so-called premise of this stinker is that the inventor and scientist Archimedes invented a huge amount of technology, including some kind of laser. One of his assistants collected everything and hid it away in a cave somewhere in ENGLAND! Uh-huh. They did this to keep this technology away from the world, which is a good thing in my opinion. Archimedes gets killed by some Roman soldiers(what?!)-or a guy at a toga party gets stabbed by a guy in a bad Halloween costume, take your pick.

Cut to the fourteen hundreds, where a really annoying, whiny little kid is being sold as a slave 'somewhere in Europe'. Europe the country, that is. A beggar buys the kid for one copper, because nobody else wanted him(what a surprise). The beggar turns out to be a spy for an organization called the Delta Knights(the airline?). He recognizes the girly slave boy as some kind of special prophet that the Knights have been waiting for, because he can translate a 'red book' left by Archimedes to point the way to the treasure. The puzzles in this book are so lame that a two year old could have figured them out, but whatever.

The beggar-knight teaches the boy for six years or so(or at least that's what it feels like). The kid grows long golden curls and looks ever more like a girl, which makes me think of a good reason why the knight kept him around so long. Especially since the boy calls him 'Master' all the time...

In comes the villain of the piece, played by the same actor who played the beggar-knight! You'd think the guy would recognize his identical twin, but no...Maybe its the stupid costume Lord Vulchare is wearing that keeps the knight from recognizing himself. It involves gold leaf, horns, and a truly silly looking cape. I'm surprised that he didn't spend all of his time swishing it. He looked like an escapee from a Broadway musical.

Lord Vulchare captures the knight, the boy rescues him using a blow gun, of all things! And then Vulchare kills the knight. I wonder what happens when you wipe out your Doppleganger... One annoying character down, a man we couldn't forgive anyway because of an earlier scene in which he threw his own urine onto a passing 'villager'. Unfortunately, the boy-girl survives and escapes.

He meets an Orlando Bloom wannabee in a tavern, after getting hit on by a tavern whore. The prissy artist type claims to be Leonardo Da Vinci, a heresy if ever I saw one. The kid can't even draw, I doubt Da Vinci EVER wore clothes that femmy, AND he spent the rest of the movie hitting on the tavern whore. The real Da Vinci might have evinced far more interest in the pretty boy-girl than in the overblown charms of the woman.

The pair saves the girl from Vulchare, I'm never sure why, and set out to find the storehouse. This is supposed to involve a trip to England, but I never saw them in any kind of boat. Did they fly over the English channel? They get captured by a Robin Hood type, who turns out to be a Prince of some kind(of what, we never find out). And lo and behold, the tavern whore turns out to be his long lost sister! At this point, I had the massive urge to slap this movie briskly..

There's a scene where the boy and Leonardo try to escape from the Robin Hood guy, and as they flee through the night a disembodied voice croons "I'm coming..." over and over again. Hysterical. Somebody was obviously sucking a medieval bong before they went out to chase down the dynamic duo.

They finally find the store house, and marvel at the cheesy artifacts. Leonardo promptly appropriates all of Archimedes' ideas, proving that he was a lucky idiot rather than any kind of genius. The kid blows up the store house to keep the treasures from getting out into the world, making you wonder: "What was the whole purpose of this movie!" Arrgh! The whole quest goes down the tubes, and you sincerely wonder why you just spent the last hour and a half wasting your time watching this piece of crap! Oh well, at least it was quite funny, especially Richard Kind as the idiotic 'great wizard'.