Knightriders

Knightriders opens with a wonderful visual gag. Through a gauzy lens we see a naked Ed Harris awake with his lady friend in sylvan glade. After bathing in the river, they don their clothes – he, the armour of a knight; she, the dress of a medieval maiden – before mounting their steed. Only then does the camera pan down to reveal that their mode of transport is not a noble horse, but a six-cyclinder Honda superbike.

George Romero's previously hard-to-find 1981 story of a travelling troupe of motorcyclists who stage mock Arthurian jousting tournaments is now available in a beautifully restored version on Blu-ray. Like the shows the biker-knights put on, the film is hammy, over-earnest, and often ridiculous; but, like them, it's also a lot of fun. In the same way that Easy Rider foreshadowed the cultural struggles of the 1970s, Romero uses the motorcycle epic to dramatise the conflict between community and commercialisation that would come to characterise the Reaganite 1980s. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]