KRULL (1983) Early 80's sci-fi cheese...what'd you expect? A lot of movies in the wake of Star Wars tried to capitalize on that franchise's success. Few had the nerve to try something so grand as to intend to actually be "the next Star Wars". I think Krull was probably one of that audacious few. Which isn't to say it's all that good. It's better than Yor: The Hunter From The Future. But then, it's not as howlingly fun either. Krull is too good to be awful, not good enough to be good for the right reasons, and not awful enough to be good for the wrong reasons. You can see the conundrum it's in. The world of Krull has a new problem in the form of a "dark fortress", has landed from outer space. I wonder if there's a Norwegian dub of this movie which calls it a "dimmu borgir". Never mind. This dark fortress is like a big spaceship in the shape of a big mountain, and each morning it teleports to a different place on the planet, making it even harder to assail. It's hard enough as it is, since the residents of Krull are your basic swords-and-horses-and-armor types, and the badguys in the dark fortress have lasers. Only a united front can stop the marauding Slayers pouring forth from the dimmu borgir - I mean, the dark fortress. So two squabbling kingdoms on Krull put aside their difference to unite under the marital union of Prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall) and Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony). In the middle of the wedding, Slayers storm the place, killing everything in sight but Colwyn, and they kidnap Lyssa and take her back to the fortress. So Colwyn has to first retrieve the Glaive of legend, a five-pronged throwing star with magic powers, and then assemble a motley crue...I mean, a motley crew of bandits and other assorted societal flotsam. (hmm...they probably should've killed Colwyn) The big slimy badguy, "The Beast" who's calling the shots for the Slayers - this guy is always shown blurrily, and with a vertically compressed image, for some reason - he wants to seal this world's fate by marrying Lyssa. Just how that works, I don't know. Probably has something to do with the voiced-over prophecy from the intro to the film, where it is said that when she chooses her king and they have a son, that son will rule the galaxy. (Wow, the whole galaxy...these people can't even fly yet!) I don't understand, but hey, maybe it's just about scoring with hot chicks. I wouldn't kick her out of bed either. Among the bandits Colwyn picks up are Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane. The script by Stanford Sherman admittedly allows even minor characters such as these two to show personalities of their own. Also picked up are a Cyclops (with a one-eye facial prosthetic that's pretty good for 1983) and a bumbling magician who keeps turning himself into animals, played by Bernard Bresslaw and David Battley respectively, both of whom walk away with the show. The magician's transformations are kind of neat from a technical standpoint, sort of a proto-morphing effect. So yeah, the story is standard quest stuff, episodic and occasionally kinda tedious (lots of plot-stopping scenes). There's a blind seer, battles with quicksand, and a spider lady too. True love might save the day at the end (yuck), but it does it by throwing fireballs (yay!). The acting is good all around and the dialogue is a lot more listenable than one might fear, with no shortage of high-fantasy cheese, but done with a relatively light touch. I was pretty disappointed by the Glaive. When it's FINALLY used (about 15 minutes to go), it does not shoot lasers from it, as suggested by the poster. It just flies and spins. This is no lightsaber. It's not even Talon's three-bladed sword. The climactic "duel" between Colwyn and The Beast is pretty lame, because Colwyn basically just stands there with his arm stretched forth (like he's using the Force) while the Glaive just spins, spins, spins. The vertical compression effect used on The Beast is most evident in the shots where the Glaive is imbedded in him - it gets all bent out of shape! The violence, while mostly in the vein of bloodless swordfights and laser battles, does have a few moments of surprising nastiness, particularly near the end, where one guy is impaled in one of those spikes-closing-in deathtrap rooms, and another gets slowly squished in one of those slowly-sliding-shut stone doorways. That latter one is one of the more prominent characters, the one we're meant to cheer when he fortuitously shows up late in the film to rescue our heroes from certain doom. This kind of thing is generally considered fair game if it happens to one of the badguys (when the Slayers are killed, their heads split open and big slugs slither out), but when it happens to one of the heroes, that's a pretty brutal touch for an otherwise family-oriented film. James Horner provides an archetypically characteristic early-80's sci-fi adventure score, which sounds an awful lot like his scores for the second and third Star Trek movies. Yeah, this is early-80's sci-fi adventure through and through, and whether or not that floats your intergalactic battlecruiser, only you can say for sure. It's no Star Wars, but it's no Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone either. BACK TO THE K's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE