Cinema: Lights! Camera! Pittsburgh!

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(2 of 3)

Romero also traveled the commercial route to independence, with low-budget scare shows that made his name and his fortune: Dawn of the Dead, the 1979 sequel to his cult classic, Night of the Living Dead, has earned $55 million worldwide. The audience reaction to Romero's perfervid shockers has always been poised between a scream and a giggle. Now, with Knightriders, Romero has taken a bigger risk: he blends Arthurian legend with modern-day bikers—Excalibur meets Easy Rider—and dares the audience to laugh at the noble exploits of working-class jousters. The Camelot caravan juggles lofty ideals and hand-to-mouth reality as it journeys from one small town to another, exhibiting swordsmanship in battles where fellowship precariously reigns and only feelings get hurt. They are the most benign of outlaws; they embody the spirit of regional cinema.

This makes for a splendid premise, and a dramatic dilemma. Except for a few oafishly drawn media sharpies, everyone in Romero's Paisley pageant is so nice that no true conflict arises. The movie begins in a splash of delirious lyricism—King William (Ed Harris), naked, birching himself clean in a sylvan lake before mounting his trusty motorsteed—then bogs down in 145 minutes of psychological verismo. The writer-director wants to present rounded, sympathetic characters but never allows them to develop beyond the caricatures in Reel 1. Romero, whose early films displayed the carnographic brio of the E.C. horror comic books of the '50s, has gone classic—or, at least, Classics Comics. Even his talent for visceral editing is restrained: the big tilts are flaccidly cut, and the final battle is confusingly anticlimactic. Romero has tried to fashion a post-industrial Camelot, and ended up putting a square peg in a Round Table.

In Polyester, Francine Fishpaw (Divine) presides over a bunch rowdier by far than any Dark Age cavalry. Her husband runs a movie house specializing in kiddie porn; her daughter trucks around with vicious punks; her son is a criminally insane foot fetishist. Only Todd Tomorrow (Tab Hunter), Francine's dream lover, offers any hope for spiritual regeneration, for he is everything her husband is not: handsome, slim, roughly debonair, and the owner of an art drive-in that shows Marguerite Duras triple bills. Best of all, he is in love with her . . . or so it seems. Francine should have known something would go wrong. She has, literally, a nose for trouble—and so has the film. Polyester is the first motion picture in Odorama, a wondrous screen gimmick that allows the movie audience to smell what Francine does. Discretion and good taste preclude revelation of the specific odors unleashed here, but be warned: this film isn't rated R for roses.