Everything about this movie works

Rating: 10/10 (26 March 2016)

1. There's nothing I can say about The Holy Grail that hasn't been said. This isn't a movie to analyse, it's a movie to just sit and soak up how wonderfully funny it is. Every moment spent figuring out why it is funny is a moment you could spend quoting the lines or just clutching your stomach as your gasp for air through your laughter.
2. A low budget is what makes this movie. Half the best jokes (intentionally or not) come from the fact that the film's budget was low - coconuts for horses, poor visual effects, the rabbit, the animator having a fatal heart attack - its all good!
3. The screenplay knows just how to drop in the most incredibly unexpected characters. Dennis the politically astute peasant, the soldiers who get bogged down discussing logistics of swallow airspeed velocity, the extremely forward women of Castle Anthrax and the effeminate Prince Herbert are just some of the hilarious characters who you would never expect to show up in a movie in this genre.
4. The addition of the Holy Hand Grenade goes to show that it isn't just characters that bemuse and amuse.
5. The amount of effort put into the film is still incredible. How many rewrites would they need for the Knights Who Say Ni scene to ensure the word "it" wasn't used? The "he's not allowed to enter the room" skit in Swamp Castle is something you'd expect from Abbott and Costello.
6. The insults are amongst the best ever written. Anything said by the French Knight (played by John Cleese) is enough to have you crying with laughter.
7. Come to think of it, anything Cleese does is hilarious. Whether he's Lancelot, so brave that he attacks a castle with his sword; the French Knight who gets a sick pleasure taunting Arthur; a famous Enchanter whose name Cleese forgot and so just ad-libbed "Tim"; a peasant who was turned into a newt and got better or the Black Knight who is so deranged in his single-minded guarding of a random bridge that he allows Arthur to chop him to pieces before he gives up, he will provide the best lines in the film.
8. Don't want to sell the rest of the cast short. Graham Chapman's angry frustration at people who don't act the way they should in a fantasy-epic is always hilarious. Terry Jones' high- pitched Bedivere and Michael Palin's Galahad are funny caricatures that are hilarious in their total lack of resemblance to the historical characters. Terry Gilliam is amusing as Patsy and the Old Man from Scene 24, among others. Eric Idle comes close to stealing the show, especially in the guise of Sir Robin, the Not Quite So Brave as Sir Lancelot.
9. Terry Gilliam's animations often add a lot of amusement to the film, especially his rendition of God and the Monster of Aaaaarghhhhh. Some of the cutaways are so funny in their own right you don't even care that it just cutaway from the adventures of Arthur and his knights.
10. The subplot of the murdered historian is strange, but given how the film ends I couldn't imagine any other way to end it. It just comes off as so appropriate for this low-budget, meta spoof of Arthurian legend.