Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot (Brexitland, 2020)

 

"I'd sooner dip my cock in a witch's cauldron."

 

Not to be confused with Arthur & Merlin, an even more forgettable movie with a similarly low budget, that came out five years earlier in 2015 (trailer). Unlike that film, which truly features an Arthur and Merlin as its main protagonists, Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot features a lot of Arthur (Richard "Bear" Short of The Tragedy of Macbeth [2021 / trailer]) but perhaps only about eight minutes of Merlin (Richard Brake of Bingo Hell [2021], Perkins' 14 [2009] and so much more), the latter of whom pops up now and then to act as Arthur's sagacious shrink. In that sense, the movie is far more Arthur's Ann Landers than either Arthur and Merlin or Knights of Camelot, though one sees a lot more of the knights than the former.

Trailer to

Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot:

To what extent Knights of Camelot is based on the legends of Arthur is unknown to us, as the days when we would read the tales of legends like King Arthur or Robin Hood are roughly a half-century gone and, gosh darn, we really don't remember much. Here, in his second feature film, director Giles Alderson — he preceded this film with The Dare [2019 / trailer] and followed it with The Stranger in Our Bed [2022 / trailer] and Wolves of War [2022 / trailer]) — and his co-scribes, Jonny Grant and actor Simon Cotton (of the hilariously horrible and forgotten Lindsay Lohen horror flick, Among the Shadows [2019 / trailer]), focus on Arthur after the tribulations seen elsewhere in better movies (Excalibur [1981 / trailer]) and worse ones (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword [2017]).

 

The year is 463 AD and Arthur and his men are on vacation in Rome... Not really. They have been down south fighting, and after five years of bloody battle, Arthur, apparently suffering PTSD, has lost his way: feeling unworthy as a king, he spends his days drinking and fighting and whoring. (So, the closest thing to a vacation that a man of the early Middle Ages could have — heck, that's what a lot of guys still do on vacation today, but with drugs added.) With the king absent in Camelot, his son Mordred (Joel Phillimore of Lost and Spaced [2020 / trailer]), whom Arthur left in charge while at war, has decided to usurp the crown and marry Lady Guinevere (Stella Stocker of Sinphony [2022 / trailer] and Marlowe [2022 / trailer]) and welcome the invading Saxons and their new god.

A low-budget independent movie, Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot is also a not-very-good movie. Populated with ciphers and one-note characterizations, the narrative is both uninteresting and oddly unfocused, resulting in a movie that might even bore the little ones. PTSD or not, Arthur moans and groans and cries and stumbles around for way too long as he searches for himself, which he eventually finds in the form of the lost sword Excalibur. (He himself never actually grows emotionally: he only is seen to have kingly resolve when standing in Merlin's shadow or when he has the sword in hand.)

And elsewhere, as Arthur searches for himself (or at least for his sword), his knights wander onward; Sir Lancelot (Tim "Heartthrob Potential" Fellingham of Choose [2011 / trailer] and Stained [2010 / trailer]) gets laid and captured, Lady Guinevere shows icy anger and resolve and tries desperately to make her one-note character into something interesting, and the viewer, as they follow a narrative that has a start and ending but no real plot in between, is left feeling that the castle and battles are strangely under-populated. 

The two most interesting characters, the duplicitous, politically minded and oddly contemporary Brother Cedric (Sam Newman of House of Shadows [2020 / trailer] and Caged [2018 / trailer]) and the conniving Vortigone (Jennifer Matter of The Forgotten [2014 / trailer], Stalker [2010 / trailer, an unneeded remake of Trauma (1976 / trailer)], Dead Cert [2010 / trailer] and Paintball [2009 / trailer]), do add some presence whenever they pop up on screen, but they are minor characters at best.

Arthur's villainous son Mordred — according to popular legend as told today, the result of Arthur bonking his half-sister Morgause — is slimy enough and has some well-delivered lines, but that Joel Phillimore is in any way a decent actor is only revealed in the final scenes, when he is finally confronted by his father, Arthur. (The rest of the time, he comes across like a second-rate Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending [2015 / trailer], but without all the fun campiness.) One of the great unanswered mysteries of the movie is why, son or not, Arthur would even make such an obvious slimeball his regent while fighting and/or on vacation abroad. The most interesting revisionism of the legend itself concerns what transpires between Sir Lancelot and Genevieve,* but even that seems oddly tacked-on and in-passing, and thus is somewhat WTF and almost anti-climactic.

* Okay, in more than one version of the "real" story they do the same thing, but she comes back to ultimately become a nun. Here it very much seems that they ride off into the sunset, Arthur unperturbed. Perhaps the biggest revision of the legend, while not all that interesting, is that Arthur is not killed by Mordred...

Perhaps there is a good movie somewhere in Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot, but it fails to reveal itself. The result is an intermittently if barely watchable time-passer that neither engages nor becomes memorable. Pass.