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TITLE: High Crusade, The
DATE : (1994, Germany, 100 mins)
GOOD : Sometimes
FIND : uncommon
GENRE: Comedy, Fantasy/Sci-Fi
THEME: Contact, Extraterrestrials, Journeying, Myth/Religion, Space-travel

PLOT : * Medieval knights hijack a UFO expecting to win the Crusades. *
     It is the 14th century. Sir Roger is in his English castle and newlywed to the beautiful lady Catherine, when word reaches that things are not going well for their countrymen in the Middle East crusades. Just then a spaceship lands outside the castle, and the knights attack it thinking it is a Muslim army. Seeing strange little pig-faced beings with lasers, the wise Brother John counsels that these not humans but demons. With God on his side, Sir Roger is undaunted and defeats them anyway. Roger then boards and reviews the craft with John and several soldiers, imagining that with this new weapon they will conquer Jerusalem. He brings his bride and her French tutor Monsieur du Lac aboard to show off the victory. Suddenly the ship takes off, and it doesn't fly to Jerusalem but, as the alien squeals with delight, to the alien home planet. The ship docks in the towers of a strange military installation, and the knights must defend themselves against the alien hordes. Making it known they have one alien hostage, the Englishmen buy time to devise a plan. Comic situations arise including one knight making friends with the hostage and inadvertently learning about alien sexual practices, which involve the rubbing of fingers. The aliens make a clone of Sir Roger to confuse the humans, but in a showdown the real Sir Roger unexpectedly wins. The humans manage to set off explosions and escape.
     (most acting is in English; Alternate Title: "High Crusade - Frikassee im Weltraum", ie. fricassee in space)

NOTES: Fans of the Poul Anderson source novel must be warned that this is not a faithful adaptation of the story that was said to be a fascinating and intelligent science-fiction drama. Instead what we have here is a Monty Python wanna-be that is perfectly enjoyable with diminished expectations, since it is low-budget in effects but serviceably so, and engorged with sight gags, rude humor, and clever Euro puns. One of the best language plays comes when the French tutor, hopelessly in love with Catherine, says "Je t'adore!" (I adore you), and she goes to shut the door. Americans show their cultural bias when smart/dumb antics like these are adored if done by themselves or Brits, but shunned when coming from Spain ("Star Knight", 1985, is similarly Pythonesque but with a much better UFO meets knights story), France (masters of a form like Jacques Tati remain obscure), or from Germany, like this film which evidences some English dubbing. Not to say that "High Crusade" is great cinema, for it certainly shows the hand of the producer, Mr. over-the-top himself Roland Emmerich, whose "Star Gate" and "Independence Day" worked but bombs like "Ghost Chase" and "Making Contact" suffer from his style of relentless mad genre blending. And there is much to dislike about "High Crusade", including the hopelessly ugly foul-mouthed aliens, and the often aimless back-and-forth scripting of the alien-human standoff.
     "High Crusade" the movie does preserve some of the metaphorical intrigue of its source story. The best acting by far comes from the monk, who debates the alien in theology. It seems that the "demons" don't believe in God, and their fatal intimidation is from assuming that the humans, with all their talk of a divine power on their side, have a super-computer secret-weapon in store. The culture clash is intriguing because of the anachronistic setting; between spaceship invasions and medieval crusades, knights and aliens, the mind feels jarred into a realm of timeless archetypes, so the movie can't help but make a lasting impression here. The foreignness of Muslims caused Christians to see heathen and go on campaigns of slaughter, when in fact the religions are cousins going back to common roots in Judaism, the ancestor that both sides are content to deny. Things get really spooky when a thousand years later, AngloAmericans are flying jets and landing with advanced weaponry in primitive dusty Middle East villages (the prescient novel was written in 1960). By hyperbolizing all-too-familiar tensions onto a cosmic playing field, the fiction can reorg the question of facts, for how must humanity respond whenever it meets siblings of the one true Source by many names (the aliens revered supercomputing, can we not relate?). We can be almost certain that even the nicest extraterrestrials will seem threatening and often blasphemous. The experiences of modern alien abductees are so full of fear and sacred awe, that they really don't clarify the nature or intent of these other life-forms, but rather still reveal human baggage. Wise people consider the world to be a mirror, so it is ironic that the best mirrors, ie. the ones that least show what is on the other side of the glass and most what is in the viewer, are things so foreign that we cannot conceive their designs and only project our own. If Christians saw devils in fellow human monotheists, what will they see in true foreigners? No wonder They haven't landed to shake our hands... yet.

NAMES: dir. Klaus Knoesel, Holger Neuhauser; writer Poul Anderson (novel), Robert G. Brown, Jurgen Egger; actors John Rhys-Davies (Brother Parvus), Rick Overton (Sir Roger), Michael Des Barres (Monsieur du Lac), Catherine Punch (Lady Catherine), Rinaldo Talamonti (Alien)   cjs-entry-Apr18, 2003

SHOP AMAZON: DVD or VHS • DVD • VHS
FURTHER RESEARCH: imdb.com • allmovie.com


All Original Writings Copyright © Carl J. Schroeder, All Rights Reserved. Images Are The Copyright Property Of The Respective Owners/Studios And Were Obtained Through Public Channels And Are Not Intended to Infringe On Any Copyrights