Movie Essays

bellview--yep, i will watch anything   

Home | Movie Reviews | Video Roundups | Essays | Game Reviews | Subscribe | Mailbag | About | Search

"Krull"

5/24/05

When I was still living in Rochester, aka "Snowchester", and then soon after I moved to the DC area, I was convinced that this strange-yet-cool sci-fi movie about this band of warriors out to take down a strange fortress was on TV like every other weekend.

That movie, "Krull", was interesting in that it wasn't really that good; I mean, it was a sci-fi fantasy about a prince named Colwyn (Ken Marshall) who loses his princess, Lyssa (Lysette Anthony) on their wedding day to a bad guy called...The Beast.  This Beast, and his army of troops called Slayers, live in a castle called The Black Fortress, and so Colwyn needs to round up a bunch of misfits to take down The Beast and get his freakin' wife back.

And, I know how silly all of this sounds, but, seriously...I freakin' LOVE "Krull"!!!

It's a hokey swashbuckler, set in a made-up world that looks a lot like a blend of New Zealand countrysides, "Labyrinth", and Dagobah.  It steals from the "Star Wars" films mercilessly; "Krull" even features a weapon of choice not unlike the Lightsaber, a five-pronged boomerang called The Glaive that can be retrieved with Force-like powers after being tossed at an enemy.  The acting is horrible; the fight scenes are poorly choreographed; the music felt like it was lifted from any of the "Star Trek" films.

And, I know this sounds crazy...I LOVE this movie!

Maybe I love it because of the random cast.  Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane are two of the stars of "Krull" that actually went on to have long, established careers.  But, they are playing minor support characters in the movie; the lead actors in "Krull", Marshall and Anthony, went on to do almost nothing.  After watching the making-of segment on the DVD recently, I learned something else--Anthony's dialogue is dubbed by an American woman with a deeper voice, a further snub on her talents.  The cast is your typical array of criminals, misfits and magic men; at no point is "Krull" taken seriously, and as a PG-rated piece of entertainment, it's good clean fun as the band takes on that camaraderie that's only possible in the movies.

And, it's directed by a real director--Peter Yates, the man who directed "Bullitt" and "Breaking Away."  In certain scenes, you can tell that there is really something going on, an undercurrent that almost doesn't fit with the genre he's working in.  You can imagine the actors thinking that they were doing really solid work while acting on set...the finished result isn't quite the same, but thanks to a real director, at least the actors felt like they had a shot at something truly special during the process.

But, you have so many hokey, what-the-fuck elements to this thing...I mean, to retrieve The Glaive in the first place, Colwyn has to scale this humungous mountain (it takes him almost two minutes of screen time to do it) and reach with HIS BARE HAND into molten lava to pull the thing free; don't worry, even though this act should have burned his entire arm off, he comes out of this process without a scratch!  And, The Black Fortress reappears at a new location every 24 hours, making it nearly impossible to find...but, thanks to a number of plot twists, Colwyn's old guy mentor Ynyr (Freddie Jones) must find out where the Fortress is by visiting an old flame that lives in a freakin' spider web!!  And, what is she known as?

"The Widow of the Web"!!!  I love "Krull"!!!

How can you not love this stuff?  Swordplay?  Cyclops?  Swamps with quicksand?  Clydesdales that can gallop so fast they light the ground on fire called--you guessed it--Firemeres???

Okay, you're right--it's not a great movie.  But I love it for what it is, and I'm sure that if you haven't seen it, you will too.

 

Random Bellviews, courtesy of Bell and Longer Community Trust:

• The NBA playoffs (NOT the regular season):  Opening Weekend

• House parties:  $9.50 Show

• The PSP:  Matinee

• The process of finding a home in the DC area:  Rental

• Not having enough time to play video games each night:  Hard Vice

 

justin@bellviewmovies.com