Your Highness: Review By B. Alan Orange

"How in the world did Danny McBride and David Gordon Green ever convince anyone in Hollywood to make Your Highness?" That's the thought that ran through my head the entire time it played out on screen. You could hardly call it an original effort, as Your Highness plunders the 80s fantasy landscape of cheesy sword and sorcery flicks like a mechanic at a pic-and-pull junkyard. Every moment reveals an odd new wonder that, if you are well versed in the genre it is making dirty love to, you will recognize.

There is a mechanical Raven that is a mock-off of Bubo the Owl from Clash of the Titans. Leezar the evil wizard, played by a stark raving mad Justin Theroux, wears David Warner's Evil Genius headpiece from Time Bandits, and that film's Minotaur makes a cameo appearance that renders the last third of the movie a ticket-only affair. Danny McBride cribs much of his performance from John Terry in Hawk the Slayer. The Winking Wall from Return to Oz shows up at one point, and the whole thing is dripping with Krull and a dozen other VHS leftovers. Though it does have the never-before-seen onscreen Unicorn sword and a diaper wearing abomination called Marteetee. That is unique to this particular oeuvre.

Your Highness is a loving ode to that long-lost world of cinematic Dungeons and Dragons. For sure. But it also brings a solid breath of fresh air back into the Cineplex that, I have to believe, most folks aren't prepared for. Your Highness is gleefully, gloriously raunchy. And it never resorts to parody, playing it straight through the muck and the madness.

As late as the early Nineteen-Nineties, we were still getting gratuitous nudity in our genre flicks. That prospect dried up due to the money-hungry ambitions of the PG-13 rating. So it may shock or unsettle any unsuspecting tween when they walk into this and see a buffet of titti*s on display. Call that what you will, I call it much needed in our current social climate. As wrecked and off as it might seem on the forefront, back in 1982, a film like Sorceress (which Your Highness gladly cribs from) was so full of frontal nudity, they couldn't even cut a trailer without brouhahaing that very fact. David Gordon Green strives hard to reach that valley, and it's a galliant effort.

Then there is Your Highness' third act. A sight gag, possibly the best joke in the film, comes to be a featured guest star that gets more screen time than Natalie Portman. And more laughs. Its an omnipresent looming presence that I dare not give away, but it renders the climax of this quest hilarious, if you are so inclined to laugh at such splendid juvenility. It's the triple punch that keeps giving, and it assures that neither David Gordon Green's king set piece, nor any moment of our boys' final encounter with the evil wizard Leezar, will be given away in a trailer or TV ad. Trust me, it's that taboo and X-rated. It's the Farrelly Brothers' Hair Gel scene for a new generation. And it involves the first full frontal, naked erect penis seen in a modern, mainstream movie.

Heck, forget that for a second. This whole adventure rests on an act I dare not spoil here for the five out of one thousand folks, on average, who are going to absolutely love Your Highness. It has a dirty mouth, and it sets out to one-up recent raunch-o-logues like the ones heard in Superbad by adding a medieval twist. Trust me, as this dangerous beast seeps into high school sleepovers and dorms across the country, it will become one of the most quoted box office bombs in recent memory. And the act upon which it is hinged will get verbally used until its raw and bleeding. If nothing else, McBride's script, which he co-wrote with his The Foot Fist Way partner Ben Best, gives plenty of descriptive nouns and adjectives that will become commonplace in the very near future.

A have a theory about Your Highness; and it may make some of you scoff:

Back in the early 80s, it was funny to see an ancient world, dominated by the denizens of a Dungeons and Dragons playbook, with a budget that could only afford its hero a pair of Levi jeans. David Gordon Green embraces that conceit and runs rampant with it, firing of shifty field plays left and right. He lets his otherworldly characters have a modern edge and sensibility. At one point, the evil wizard Leezar serves up breaded Gordon's fish sticks. Which leads me to a pretty obvious theory about the film's true intentions:

This is a counter-piece to the LARPing doc*mentary Darkon, where we're seeing the adventure as played out through the characters' own eyes.

If you go back and watch that 2006 expose on a group of individuals who spend there weekends and vacations in the wilderness reenacting the basement adventures of their twelve sided dice while hoofing down cheeseburgers, you'll notice a striking similarity between it and Your Highness. These nerds truly believe in their Quest. And their Quest is riddled with the same inconsistencies and nods to modern culture that David Gordon Green, as a director, allows himself here. They can't help but swear, its what they do in their everyday lives. They can't help but snack on a Value Meal between bouts of swordplay. Because that's what they have on this plain of reality. Those small, telltale signs don't sneak, but proudly walk onto the screen in Your Highness. Its purposely jarring, and I half expected the action to do a slow fade into reality during its final moments, revealing that Danny McBride's Thadeous and James Franco's Fabious are two college buddies knocking each other about with cardboard-wrapped brooms in the local park.

That doesn't happen, of course. But it very easily could, and we'd buy into it. But those of us who fully love the moments being sold here would be disappointed. Because this is a world unto itself, and its set up for further questing adventures. McBride and Portman (who comes to this party late, and doesn't stick around long; I think all of her scenes are in the trailer), bring the curtain closed with promises of another rousing tale that sounds even more robust than this first outing. If I had to guess, Your Highness will hit its opening weekend box office chart somewhere around the #7 spot. So it will take some stout DVD sales to see a second Your Highness into theaters. (Maybe they'll go direct-to-DVD with a new cast? It is Universal, who is notorious for doing that, after all.)

Maybe the greatest thing about David Gordon Green's latest is his use of practical effects. There is some CGI, but his creatures are mostly old school puppets and men in c*mbersome costumes that look, truth be told, better than what we've seen in recent years. It's not a lofty cartoon by any means. Green is an astute storyteller who knows his way around a good drama. Snow Angels, which came out around the same time as his Pineapple Express, still stands as one of the most original adult-aimed outings of the last past decade. Though it went unseen by far too many people. He brings that knack for human emotion and character into this wild ride, and while some of it does move at a stoner's gait ala Krull, it also has some great action set pieces, even going as far as to stage a thrilling car chase using a horse drawn carriage.

A good litmus test for if you should see Your Highness is whether or not you liked Danny McBride's Foot Fist Way. A lot of the humor hits those same notes (of coure). Your Highness is also similar in a lot of ways to last summer's mega-bomb MacGruber. While that failed at the box office, it has, and still is, being championed by a small faction of irreverent, modern day, quasi-avant-garde humor lovers. Your Highness is defiantly an acquired taste. And as evident at the advanced screening, it will have a lot of people groaning in the isles. This thing is seated at a table all its own. And it's defiantly not the cool kids table. And the weird thing is, they don't think so either.

General audiences will loathe this daffy homage to swords, sorcerers, and titti*s. But those select few who stayed up late to sneak a peek at the raunchy fantasy epics of yesteryear as they played incessantly on cable TV throughout the 80s will get a hard-thrusting kick in the nuts from Your Highness. Those individuals will worship this as one of the few, great comedies of the year. The rest will be bored or appalled by its bawdy pageantry.

Your Highness = Whoop-doo!