Your Highness

April 13th, 2011 | 10:15 am by Halle Kiefer (@hallekiefer)

Your Highness Recap: What A Long, Strange, Profoundly Awful Trip It’s Been

Now that Your Highness has hit theaters, you can rest assured there is a funny, raunchy medieval comedy out there for you to enjoy. It’s called Robin Hood: Men In Tights and it came out in 1993. However, if you like wacky violence, topless ladies and production values so cheap it makes your high school gym look like the set of Gone With The Wind, then sit down while I spin you the tale of Your Highness.

Danny McBride plays slovenly, horny Prince Thadeous, who spends his day porking the wife of the dwarf king and smoking bowl after bowl of the kingdom’s finest. From the first f-bomb dropped in a high English accent, McBride is basically Eastbound and Down‘s Kenny Powers; they didn’t even bother to give him a new haircut. While this might have been a clever way to reel in moviegoers familiar with his foul-mouth ball player, it wasn’t the best way to, you know, make a film that wasn’t terrible.

[Warning - spoilers below the jump!]

James Franco Improvised Being Molested By A Wizard In Your Highness

He was an award show host, a film student and an Oscar nominee, and that was just over a long weekend. Now director David Gordon Green praises the fact that James Franco’s Your Highness scenes were improvised, particularly the rich, insightful decision to be sexually molested by a magician. “When they go and visit the wise wizard, in the script that’s just an exposition scene: ‘This is what you do, see you later,’” Green explained to New York Mag. “We were kind of bored with that exposition, so Franco goes, ‘What if I got molested by [the wizard]?’” Colin Firth wishes he could have come up with something half as genius for The King’s Speech, though to be fair they would have just edited it out for the PG-13 version.

Apparently Your Highness, Natalie Portman and Danny McBride rounding out the cast also features a “sexually arouse Minotaur,” the kind of bold decision that helps a talent like Franco hone his craft. “It’s so funny, in a movie like this, to be sitting around with very acclaimed creature designers and executive from the studio, and say, ‘We’re gonna do something that’s pretty graphic and vulgar, and it’s gonna be a substantial plot point,’” Green laughed “And they’re very straitlaced people, just going, ‘Well, should the penis be circumcised?’” We think you know who you need to turn to with questions like that.

[Photo: Getty Images]