The pilgrims gather, but these are not the sober, weary travelers of Chaucer’s verse. Here, the Knight is a musclebound oaf in dented aluminum foil armor who speaks only in grunts. The Miller has a nose like a strawberry and a laugh like a donkey’s bray. The Pardoner is a gaunt, androgynous figure in velvet who sells “indulgences” that turn out to be scratch-off tickets. And the Host, a sleazy rotund man named Harry Bailly (played with manic glee by B-movie legend Ron “The Hammer” Hartley), claps his hands.
And we do. We get it.
The climax of the film—narratively, at least—is not a sex scene. It is a storytelling competition between the Nun and the Pardoner. The Nun (a doe-eyed young woman with braces, which she keeps hidden behind a wimple) tells a pious, boring tale about a saint who turns down a demon’s offer of a magic goat. The pilgrims boo. The Pardoner then tells a wild, incoherent story about a fake relic—a jar containing “the last fart of the Angel Gabriel”—that causes a village to riot. It is absurdist, surreal, and ends with the Pardoner himself laughing so hard he forgets his lines and simply points at the camera and says, “Ah, hell, you get it.” The Ribald Tales Of Canterbury -1985- -Classic-