Knights (1993)

Cyborgs ride horses, wield swords and spears, and rule the earth, hunting humans to suck their blood for nourishment.

You’ve seen it all before, but the script is a smidgen better, the action more playful than most B-level action flicks, and this time the hero destined for greatness is a pretty blonde (Kathy Long). She does some realistic asskicking, and it’s really her, not some stunt performer, so I paused the movie to look her up — Ms Long was a champion kick-boxer from the 1980s.

Knights seems to have run out of money before running out of story, so the plot ends with no resolution, but I’m still thumbs-upping it. I’m a sucker for tough chick flicks, and this one’s enjoyably ridonkulous. Plus Kris Kristofferson and Lance Henricksen as cyborgs.

Verdict: YES, 2/3 of a micron above MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Knock Down Ginger (2018)

10-minute short, about several obnoxious teenagers being obnoxious, and then what goes around comes around, in a dumpster.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Knock on Any Door (1949)

Pretty Boy Romano (John Derek, who is kinda pretty) is a hoodlum with a long rap sheet, but swears he didn’t kill a cop. His lawyer (Humphrey Bogart) believes him, and takes the case.

The trial is most of the movie, with extended flashbacks and bleeding heart liberal politics. Directed by Nicholas Ray (Johnny Guitar, On Dangerous Ground, Rebel Without a Cause), several scenes are basically “Hold everything while I reiterate the movie’s point,” and the point is that the injustices of society are as responsible for making Romano a crook as Romano himself.

Society is absolutely an accomplice in most crimes. Give people access to what they need — a home, food, a living wage — and crime would plummet. That can’t be allowed, tho0ugh, because Rich Bastards are stingy, and it’s useful when high crime rates keep people fearful.

Overall, Knock on Any Door is a tad too preachy, but it’s a sermon I mostly endorse.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Know for Sure (1941)

Wearing a white coat and smoking a cigarette, a doctor wants to talk with you. From the US Public Health Service and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, this 20-minute short is a lecture on sex safety, never once using the word ‘sex’.

Ward Bond is diagnosed with syphilis, and gonorrhea is going around, too. Side effects include suicide and stillbirth. The moral is, have some morals, and if you can’t do that, “Get a blood test for syphilis.”

Verdict: THANKS, DOC.

♦ ♦ ♦

Knowing (2009)

At an elementary school in the 1950s, kids are assigned to write messages to be sealed in a time capsule, and opened fifty years later. One kid is a freaky geeky girl, who scribbles a page of numbers, line after line.

Flash forward 50 years: the time capsule is opened, the messages handed out to current students at the school, and by cosmic coincidence the long-ago freaky geeky girl’s page of numbers is handed to a freaky geeky boy.

The boy’s father is a physics professor at MIT, because of course he is. He studies the numbers and gradually groks that they’re references to major disasters over the past five decades. So how did freaky geeky girl know all this stuff before it happened? And what about the last few numbers on the page, which seem to predict something ghastly will happen in October?

That’s the mystery, to be solved by Nicolas Cage, with help from Rose Byrne. Along the way, things happen that (even beyond the film’s basic premise) make no sense, and the story leaps over oceanic plot holes. It’s also sorta spiritual, vaguely Christian, but hadn’t reached serious woo or altar-call levels by the time I got bored and clicked it off.

If you watch it to the end, let me know whether the ghost of Billy Graham shows up to save everyone’s soul.

The biggest problem with Knowing is utter shit CGI that makes its several disaster scenes look laughable. It’s some of the worst effects I’ve seen in a modern big-budget movie, and it sinks the flick before the flick has a chance to sink itself.

Hey, Hollywood: if your effects are this lame, it would be far more effective to skip the effects entirely, and simply have a good actor say, “And then the plane crashed, and then the train crashed, and then the city blew up.”

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling (1986)

Saw this 40 years ago, and kinda liked it. Saw it again a few weeks back, and kinda didn’t.

It’s the biography of fictional funny guy Jo Jo Dancer, played by genuine funny guy Richard Pryor. Jo Jo tells plenty of jokes and brings some laughs, but not many compared to the real Richard Pryor. That’s to be expected and isn’t a complaint, cuz this isn’t a comedy. It’s a heavy drama, about a comedian’s troubled life.

The film is at least somewhat autobiographical, as Jo Jo goes up in flames while freebasing cocaine, same as Pryor had a few years before the movie. Dunno whether the rest of the story is fiction or faction, but Pryor is one of three writers credited.

Anyway, in the story, Jo Jo has it rough, for his whole life. There’s never a time when he gets a fair shake at anything, so in scene after scene we’re shown Jo Jo getting unfairly screwed over, and screwed over, and screwed over again. As the screw-overs accumulated, I cared less and less.

See, in my experience, when someone tells even half this many stories of getting screwed over, by shitty parents, shitty friends, shitty strangers, shitty bosses, shitty wives, shitty incidents, and shitty coincidences, shitty everything except never their shitty self, the person telling the story is full of shit, and mostly at fault for their shitty life.

Still love the late Mr Pryor, and always will, but I didn’t love Mr Dancer.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

Werner Herzog on AI filmmaking: “It’s phenomenally, abysmally stupid. I will not take part in it.”

Coming soon: Rich Flu

Moviegoer using phone during film pepper-sprayed in theater, police say

9/24/2026

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.
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