Knight Chills – DVD Review

Film, Reviews

Available at Amazon.com

Director
Katherine Hicks

Cast
Tim Jeffery… Jack Nixon
DJ Perry… Zac
Michael Rene Walton… John
Laura Tidwell… Brooke

Running Time: 82 Minutes
Release Date: September 4, 2007

The Film

Back in the 80s there were a number of films about the evils of roleplaying. With Knight Chills someone has decided to respond. Of course, the movie they made defending roleplaying has someone coming back to life as the character they used to roleplay as. Probably not the best way to go when you’re trying to show how RPGs are just harmless fun.

Knight Chills has one of the least eventful first acts in cinematic history. In the first 30 minutes of this 82 minute movie there’s an extended roleplaying sequence (with exciting dice rolling action!), a few scenes of exposition-heavy backstory and then a second extended roleplaying sequence.

Fortunately, after the second roleplaying sequence finally comes to an end, John, the creepy nerd who’s obsessed with another player (Brooke) and takes roleplaying waaaay too seriously, gets rejected and decides to kill himself and come back as his roleplay character, Sir Kallio. Upon his return, Sir Kallio goes after those who wronged John in a fairly standard slasher-movie killing spree.

Once Sir Kallio comes to life, the movie does get considerably better. By no means does it reach the level of ‘good’ (in fact, it gets rather silly), but after thirty minutes of nothing happening just having actual plot developments is a major relief.

Sadly the villain of the film (both John and his alter-ego, Sir Kallio) is simultaneously the most developed and the most inconsistently treated character. For instance at the start of the film, Laura (Jack’s wife) greets John enthusiastically and the two discuss roleplaying. Then a bit later on Laura tells another girl all about how she “heard that [John] killed his younger brother”. I think that was probably added later on to give John’s character a bit more menace, but you wouldn’t think you’d be inviting murderers to hang out at your house and interact with your small child.

And as for Sir Kallio, he’s supposed to be fulfilling John’s vow to protect Brooke and wronging those who harmed John in some way. And yet he also turns up at one point to visit another character for no apparent reason. And while there he kills someone else who just happened to be in the same hallway. It’s like the writers wanted Sir Kallio to abide by a code of honor but then ignored that when they decided the movie needed an extra kill.

Knight Chills was made at least a decade too late. After John’s death, the teacher who runs the gaming club and serves as Dungeon Master gets police scrutiny, media harassment and suspended from his job. All because of the satanic influence these roleplaying games have on youth (despite the fact his club was comprised entirely of people who had already graduated from high school, and were merely former students). In the special features, one of the co-writers says that the negative reaction that Jack (the school teacher) experienced was inspired by his own experience as a teacher running a gaming club in 1989. While anti-roleplaying crusades were all the rage in the 80s, by the time this movie was shot (1998 according to some of the behind the scenes footage), video games were the thing to blame whenever something bad happened.

Also, while I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons I know people who play and I’m almost certain that’s the game that was being played in the extended roleplaying sequences. I did a search on Pandemonium (what they claimed they were playing) and that game is a comedy roleplaying game inspired by the Weekly World News; they definitely weren’t playing Pandemonium. From the special features, it’s clear that the writers are big fans of Dungeons and Dragons, so there’s no way it was an error. They probably just couldn’t get/afford the rights to use the Dungeons and Dragons name.

One thing Knight Chills has going for it is that it’s obviously a labor of love. The people involved with the movie are obviously fans of roleplaying. Unfortunately a lot of those people are not so great actors (Laura Alexander’s portrayal of Laura is particularly painful; though that may be because her character is tasked with relaying an awful lot of clumsy exposition). But there’s a feeling that everybody’s really passionate about what they’re doing that helps to make the movie more enjoyable than it should be.

The core premise isn’t a bad one either. A guy is obsessed with a hobby to the point where it becomes his life, he then dies only to return to carry on his hobby in perverse new ways. If you were to edit this movie down to a run time of maybe 45 or 50 minutes, and trimmed the ending by about 15 seconds, you’d have a decent movie on your hands.

A few pluses and an interesting premise do a good movie make. It does make for a fun bad movie though. In fact, Knight Chills is an ideal candidate if you’re looking for a movie you can watch with your friends and share some laughs.

The Audio and The Video

The video is 1.77:1 widescreen and is rather low quality. There are no issues with scratches or dirt or anything like that, it just seems like the cameras/film used at the time of shooting were low quality and the DVD video reflects this. The audio’s Dolby Digital and it’s of much better quality; there are no real issues with the audio.

The Extras

The extras are another area that gives you a sense the people working on Knight Chills did their best to make this a worthwhile DVD. While there’s sadly no DVD commentary there are some neat little inclusions that you don’t find on every DVD release.

Here’s probably the best place to note that the movie is also missing something you find on virtually every DVD release. There’s no chapter/scene selection to be had here. In fact, there are no chapters set at all. If you start watching the movie and you hit the button to skip to the next chapter, absolutely nothing happens. I’m not sure why they left the scene selection out; it’s not like it’s difficult to implement.

Trailer – Considering the movie, the trailer is actually fairly effective. Unlike the actual movie, it’s got some genuinely spooky moments. Of course, it also gives away an awful lot, including the final line of dialog in the film, so you should probably avoid the trailer until you’ve already seen the movie.

Photos – Some photos and storyboards from the movie. By default, the photos flash by pretty quickly. When it gets to the storyboards, it slows down to give you more time to take in the extra details. While the photos go by a little too quickly, it’s a nice change of pace from having to either wait way too long or constantly hit next as with most DVD photo galleries.

Dungeon Tour – Tour of the “Dungeon” set where all the game sessions and a few other scenes take place. It’s not actually a set, it turns out, but rather it is the room that one of the co-writers, Jeff Kennedy, uses for running his own gaming club, much like the one in the movie. It really is less about the movie and more about Jeff Kennedy showing us all the geeky stuff he has, but it’s a fun featurette.

News Story – A local news story covering the filming of Knight Chills (though the movie was called Winter Chills at that point).

Special FX – A collection of footage of cast and crew setting up and executing special effect shots (involving the car crash sequence) accompanied by music.

The Building of a Bad Guy – More on-location footage (once again with musical accompaniment), this time centered around the knight, Sir Kallio.

Cast and Crew – Additional on-location shooting without any specific theme this time; it’s some woman from the cast or crew (we never see the person holding the camera, and she never says her name) going around pointing a camera at people/things. Unlike the other two on-location featurettes, people sometimes address the camera here, making it a more interesting and enjoyable featurette to watch.

The Inside Pulse

I like Knight Chills. It’s got all kinds of problems and it takes over a third of the movie before the main plot really starts to move forward, but it has its charm. I’m scoring it pretty low, but if you’re a fan of B movies, or just of making fun of B movies, you could do far worse than Knight Chills.

The DVD Lounge’s Ratings for Knight Chills
CATEGORY
RATING
(OUT OF 10)
THE MOVIE

3
THE VIDEO

4
THE AUDIO

7
THE EXTRAS

5
REPLAY VALUE

6
OVERALL
3.5
(NOT AN AVERAGE)