KULL THE CONQUEROR It's like Conan lite...very lite Damn - I actually found myself at one point during this movie thinking to myself "Y'know, I wish that monster was CGI." Watching Kull The Conqueror makes me understand a little better why the campier segments of recent decades' horror offerings are so loathed by some fans of the genre. It doesn't send me to the same reaches of hostility, but it does improve my appreciation for the point of view. I loved Conan The Barbarian, in part because it managed to pull off taking a mostly silly genre and asking to be taken seriously in it by finding a balance between played-down camp elements and a pulpily epic feel. But I also like the Hercules TV show, and Xena, in the sense that I enjoy an episode once in a while because they're a lot of lighthearted, goofy fun. The same goes for this movie, somewhat. But the camp factor puts a lot of people, maybe most people, in a mindset where that comes to be what they expect from other offerings in that genre, and that's how they receive them regardless of how they're intended. In other words, because of the way that Xena et al has conditioned modern audiences to view things like sword-and-sorcery movies, a movie like Conan would be poorly received today, and probably wouldn't be made at all. Instead, we get Dungeons & Dragons, with no nudity, and a jive-talkin' black sidekick. I don't agree that individual shows or movies can or should be held responsible for their effects on the genres they're in (it's the audiences that react to them which should bear that burden), so I bear no ill will towards these shows, any more than I would towards, say, Evil Dead 2 for making some poor bastard out there giggle himself silly every time he sees blood spurt across the screen. All this having been said, Kull The Conqueror is a good example of a lot of things that are wrong with this genre these days, but as we will see, all is not yet lost. Kull The Conqueror is based on a character originally created by Conan creator Robert E. Howard; for that matter, the script started out as the third Conan movie but Arnold turned it down. So, a little retooling, Kevin Sorbo signs on to star, and we've got Kull! Kull's a barbarian from Atlantis (they have barbarians in Atlantis?), who we first see kicking some ass with this huge battleaxe. Yeah, baby - the world needs more battleaxe fights! But the snooty leader of the King's guard (Thomas Ian Griffith) still won't let him join. Then the guards are called back to the palace on an emergency. Kull manages to arrive at the same time, even though he's on foot and the guards are on horseback. Anyway, the King has slaughtered all of his heirs in a fit of apparent madness, and somehow this results in Kull and the King in a duel to the death, which Kull wins. With his dying breath, the King bequeaths his crown (which looks like a gold wastepaper basket) to Kull, surely resisting with superhuman strength the urge to say "Ya got moxy, kid!" Damn, all the way from barbarian to King, and that's just the first ten minutes of the film! The rest of the movie is, plotwise, cheesy even by this genre's standards (there's an Evil Resurrected Demon-Queen played by Tia Carerre, and they even have to go on a quest to find, uh, the Ultimate Power, or something). Not like anybody's watching this movie for the plot. No, what I hope for in movies like this is to simply convince me of their own fantastical reality, to effectively transport me into their sword-swinging world. So how does Kull The Conqueror measure up? Kinda so-so. I've said it before: what these movies most desperately need are blood, steel, fire, and tits. This movie has a LOT of fire, and quite a bit of steel, which often reflects the fire. Actually, there's so much fire that I quite admired the movie's look, where everything's lit by torch- or bonfire-light. But the only tits here aren't actually shown (there's toplessness, but you don't get to see anything), and as for blood...it's a PG-13 movie. Two for four, that's not too good. Which isn't to say that this doesn't have its own charms. The battle scenes, though largely bloodless, are mostly well-done and refreshingly lacking in Xena-like slapstick wire stunts (if only the script itself avoided the cheesy one-liners and double entendres). The near-climactic scenes in an ice cave look great and are probably the most successful in the film. Sorbo is an effortlessly likeable actor, so seemingly easygoing that it's almost impossible to imagine him being, say, angry. For that reason alone, he's just not right for this role. He's also way too well-spoken and obviously intelligent to be a very convincing barbarian, though to be fair, the only thing that really makes him a barbarian is that snobby people keep calling him that. For that matter, Kull is anti-slavery, anti-harems...anti-everything that barbarians have fun with, which just goes to show that yes, in some movies, every protagonist DOES have to be a role model. The rest of the cast is okay, either droning through their lines unnoticeably (the good guys) or hamming it up outrageously (the bad guys). Somehow, Harvey Fierstein manages to find his way onto the cast as a pirate captain (!), playing the role much as you might expect. The special effects are a bit of a mixed bag, the best of which being Carerre floating in a pillar of fire, the worst of which being what she turns into. Actually, the biggest offender has to be the score by Joel Goldsmith (you might say he's Jerry's kid), which just goes to show that there's no crueler way to mock hard rock music than having somebody alien to the genre try to compose some of it. That's not to say that a heavy metal score wouldn't work, but it sure doesn't here. Certainly, the worst score for this kind of movie since Ladyhawke. It's dumb, and it's goofy, but as I said, all is not lost; its failure at the box office might actually give one hope that maybe audiences are starting to ask for something different from this kind of film after all. Gladiator was a bit of a step in the right direction but I like my clashing-swords sagas with some magic and/or monsters in them. That one was no box-office failure, and maybe it might lead to some corrections in this problem-plagued genre. Well, I can hope. Directed by John Nicolella, who died about a year afterward, and written by Charles Edward Pogue, who co-wrote Cronenberg's The Fly, if you can believe that. BACK TO THE K's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE