Another Trip Through the Wayback Machine: “Krull”

So, back during the summer of 1983, the world was awash in ads for the movie Krull. Being the little sci-fi geek I was, naturally I really, really wanted to see this movie. So did my friends. Somehow, though, we never managed to do it. You know, when you’re 11 you have to arrange for someone to give you a ride to the movie theater. It’s a big logistical mess. So the movie never quite had the longevity its creators hoped for and it disappeared from theaters pretty fast. Anyway, a couple weeks ago I saw the DVD in the store and realized that it was high time I filled in that Krull-shaped hole I’ve had in my life for the past 25 years.

Okay, so Krull takes place on the planet Krull. So far so good. Krull is at a stage in its development roughly equivalent to our Middle Ages. As the movie begins, Krull is invaded by a malevolent entity from outer space known only as “The Beast.” Beastie flies around in a massive spaceship/city called the Black Fortress (it’s really more of a putty-color than black) and commands an army of creatures known as Slayers (the screenwriters really didn’t break much of a sweat coming up with nomenclature in this movie). To form an alliance against The Beast, Prince Colwyn and Princess Lyssa decide to marry. Their dads aren’t happy about this, but they won’t be around for long, so who cares about them? The wedding is attacked by Slayers before Colwyn and Lyssa can be properly joined. The Slayers pretty much make a mess of the place. They kill most everybody, knock out Colwyn and snatch Lyssa as a gift to The Beast.

Now, I’m not really certain why The Beast would want/need to marry a Krullian. The Beast is, after all, pretty bestial. And Lyssa is actually kind of dull (it doesn’t help that Lysette Anthony’s English-accented voice is dubbed over by Lindsay Crouse who sounds like a soccer mom reeading a Harlequin romance novel aloud). If you could fly your metropolis to different planets and subjugate them, it ain’t gonna be long before you meet someone more interesting than Lyssa. But, hey, whatever. We need the movie to go.

Colwyn is nursed back to health by Yryr the Old One (literally, that’s his title), who explains to him that The Beast has Lyssa. Colwyn starts to mope about losing his father and bride on the same day, but Ynyr tells him to cowboy the fuck up and get some. And the best way to do this is by using the mystical weapon known as the Glaive. It takes about fifteen minutes for Colwyn to get the Glaive (not exactly an epic task, that one), but it entails sticking his arm into hot lava, so it’s a rough fifteen minutes. Colwyn emerges unscathed (fire has odd properties on Krull, as we’ll see later), but now that he has this powerful weapon, Ynyr sternly tells him he must only use it at the proper time (i.e. the last ten minutes of the movie). Well, that was certainly worth sticking his bare arm into molten lava for.

With the Glaive securely fixed to Colwyn’s belt (where it will hang impotently for the better part of the movie), the two of them set out to find the Beast. Problem being, the Black Fortress changes location every night, so to find it they need the help of The Seer (yeah, that’s his only name—not Dave the Seer, or Randy the Seer and Notary Public, he’s just the Seer). Along the way, they hook up with an incompetent magician named Ergo, and a bunch of escaped convicts. You’d think the convicts would cause a problem, but Colwyn wins them over with his winning charm and promises of full pardons if they help him slay The Beast. The escaped convicts don’t have much else better do than the usual banditry, so they go along with him. Following behind at a discreet distance is a Cyclops, whose people apparently have a beef with The Beast.

The Seer turns out to be a bust, so they need to go to the Emerald Temple which is a sort of Hubble Telescope for clairvoyants.  The Emerald Temple is actually a bunch of trees in the middle of a swamp (the one time the writers get creative…). Before the Seer can, you know, see, he’s killed and the rest of them are ambushed by Slayers. So much for plan A.

Plan B entails Ynyr visiting the Widow of the Web. It’s an odd moniker since, as their exchange reveals, she’s not a widow at all, but a child-killer. I guess the writers couldn’t sell director Peter Yates on The Child-killer of the Web. Other than the ‘Widow’ part, it’s a pretty accurate name. She does, in fact, live in an immense web, spun by a gigantic, crystal spider. And I gotta say, that spider’s pretty scary. Naturally, it’s not as scary as the one in Return of the King (Siobhan? Shibboleth? Whatever the fuck its’ name was), but for a special effect of the early ’80s it’s awfully scary. Anyway, Ynyr and the WoW rap a little bit, catch up on old times, and she tells him where the Black Fortress will be the next day. And then the spider eats her. And Ynyr dies when the magical hourglass’s sands run out (long story, don’t ask).

In the meanwhile, Lyssa is wandering throughout the Black Fortress. The whole place is kind of trippy and psychedelic like the apartment in Repulsion. At the same time The Beast is trying to convince Lyssa to marry him by tempting her with promises of power and wealth, and by assuring her that Colwyn has already forgotten her and moved on.  Okay, I have to pause here and wonder what the hell kind of galactic tyrant has to persuade to marry him a woman he captured and whose planet he’s enslaving? This guy so does not have game. He even assures her that he can appear as anyone she wants and not, say, his normal, grotesque self. Dude, he’s a galactic conqueror! He should be like, “Love me, love my ten-fingered talon-claws. Or else I’ll burn your whole planet to the mantle, babe. Now who’s your daddy?”

So back to Colwyn and Co. They know where the Black Fortress is going to be, but it’s pretty far away. So they ride some firemares—essentially Clydesdales with flaming hooves that can fly. They get to the Black Fortress and invade it (someone left a window open or something). They storm the Fortress and brave its many weird corridors and traps until Colwyn finally reaches Lyssa’s prison in the Fortresses inner sanctum. Oh, and he’s apparently clear to use the Glaive now. Great. Not that it wouldn’t have been helpful an hour earlier in the movie when it might have saved some lives, but okay. Better late than never. Colwyn uses the Glaive as a flying buzzsaw to cut through the inner sanctum, but when he faces The Beast, it fails pretty spectacularly. Sure it ignites some of the plasma-charges the Beast spits at him, but when it comes time to kill it, the Glaive doesn’t do much. Instead, Colwyn and Lyssa complete their wedding vows, and Colwyn’s hand burns with the flame of their wedding torch (wtf?) which he throws at The Beast until he incinerates it.

So that’s Krull. The story leaves a bit to be desired, doesn’t it? Aside from not working real hard to name anything, screenwriter Stanford Sherman pretty much just rips off the hero cycle and doesn’t do a damn thing to make it new and/or interesting. The Krull universe is pretty perplexing, too, since Krull hasn’t yet reached an industrialized age, yet the characters are all perfectly comfortable with the notion of space travel. The Slayers have laser spears that work for one shot, and then become short-swords. So, what? The Beast can fly his city/ship through space, but can’t arm his Slayers with automatic weapons? Is Donald Rumsfeld his Secretary of Defense, too?

The characters are all pure cardboard, and the actors don’t do much to compensate. As Colwyn, Ken Russell comes off as a cocky naïf. Director Peter Yates (Bullitt, Breaking Away) describes him as a latter-day Errol Flynn. To me, he seemed more like a tinnier version of Tom Cruise’s 1980s “kneel-before-the-awesome-power-of-my-teeth” persona. Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane are among the bandits that ride with Colwyn, but of course they weren’t famous yet, so they didn’t get anything interesting to do.

Still, Krull does boast some great conceptual designs. Everything associated with The Beast is unnatural and otherworldly in a way that 40 years of Star Trek series never quite managed. The Slayers boast an original and compelling design and feature the neato trait of having some sort of alien squid burst out of their cranial dome after they’ve been mortally wounded (I can’t seem to find any decent pix of Slayers online–c’mon Internet geeks, what’s the matter with you?). Krull has a rousing score, too, courtesy of longtime Hollywood veteran James Horner. Yates employs the music a bit too liberally, slathering the film in horns and strings until they cease to have any dramatic effect. I mean it’s hard to be carried away by the music when every time a character takes a leak, it’s scored like the U.S.S. Enterprise leaving spacedock.

Krull had a troubled conception. Initially, it was to be a film version of Dungeons and Dragons. Then it was going to be Dragons of Krull—until the movie Dragonslayer crashed and burned at the box-office (too bad, since it was a good film that featured a great dragon—not like those slack-ass Korean dragons that can’t be bothered to have wings or breathe fire). The producers obviously had high hopes for it, though, as they had videogame tie-ins, comics (I had that), and even planned action figures. Unfortunately, the movie went over like the Hindenberg. Oh, well. It still looked plenty cool to this eleven year-old in 1983.

Lessons learned:

1) Never trust your childhood memories of how cool stuff was

2) When you acquire a magical weapon, don’t hold it in reserve while your forces get picked off.

3) Don’t kill your kids, or else you’ll be doomed to live in a giant spider web.

4) Love conquers all. By turning your arm into a flamethrower.