How High
'Your Highness' comes out swinging with an evening of sword-and-sandal action
By Kimberley Jones, Fri., April 8, 2011
"I think I might get grounded after the movie plays," joked David Gordon Green at Monday night's Your Highness: Swords & Sorcery Supreme all-night event. The director was alluding to the presence of his parents in the audience at the Alamo Drafthouse South; after all, they were the ones who forbade him from watching the cheesy sword-and-sandal epics of the early Eighties that inspired his latest film, Your Highness.
Green was joined by co-writer and star Danny McBride and co-star Justin Theroux for a triple feature: a sneak of action-comedy Your Highness, bookended by 35mm prints of two of Your Highness' genre forebearers, 1982's The Sword and the Sorcerer and 1983's Krull. ("To have the movie we made play with Krull? It's insane," Green said.) And then there were the signature Alamo pyrotechnics, including, yes, actual pyrotechnics, plus a medieval-inspired menu, a mead-drinking game, a meatball-eating contest (the meatballs made of bull testicles, by the way), and a go at the classic Krull arcade game.
When asked by an audience member about the experience of watching Your Highness with a crowd, Green responded, "I laugh just at the novelty that it exists." And speaking of novel, Alamo programmer Zack Carlson, who led the Q&A in wizard robes and beard, congratulated distributor Universal for its open-mindedness regarding one of the film's most profitable gags: "I think we should all salute Universal for having a visible Minotaur penis for about 20 minutes."
Your Highness opens in theatres Friday, April 8. Read our review.
