George Romero is, of course, the director of The Night of the Living Dead and its numerous sequels. This was his first non-horror film. Knightriders centres around a peculiarly horrible American phenomenon, that of the ‘renaissance fayre’. This is an opportunity for American anglophiles, of whom there are unfortunately many, to dress up in quasi-Elizabethan costumes, eat hamburgers, watch jousting, buy leather belts and engage in other supposedly medieval pursuits. In this case the jousting tournament takes place on Japanese motorcycles. Why not? Americans, coming from a very young country, seem extremely anxious to establish their place in history. Hence their interminable rambling about geneology, and their tendency to purchase spurious family trees and to build Tudor-style mansions in the Arizona desert and in Beverly Hills.