MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1975) *** (out of four)
This movie is a long-running favorite of Internet nerds, many of which wrote me nasty e-mail letters asking why I'd never written a review of it. Well, here it is, Monty Python fans, so you can stop cursing me in the name of Bill Gates. And guess what, I liked MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, although I had the added advantage of being able to read the script beforehand, which I found -- where else? -- on the Internet. Otherwise, I probably would have missed some of the key jokes because of that funny accent those English people have.
As with the subsequent Python films, almost all the parts in the film are played by John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, who also collectively wrote the script. The year is 787 and King Arthur is making a trek across England to attract knights for his round table. After a witch trial and fight with the Black Knight, who keeps issuing challenges to Arthur even after his arms and legs have been chopped off (probably the single funniest scene in the movie), Arthur and his knights are stopped by God Himself, who parts the clouds to tell them to go after the holy grail. So they do.
Along the way comes a lot of episodic comedy, like the scene where a knight is trapped in a castle with over a hundred lonely women between the ages of 16 and 19 (reminiscent of the much less funny CASINO ROYALE) and run-ins with a three-headed knight and the knights who say "ni." Finally comes the final scenes, where the Python knights do battle with a ferocious rabbit and answer obscure questions to get across the bridge. The ending itself is bizarre and abrupt, but the rest of the movie has enough hilarity to make up for the few sequences that just don't work.
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