Krull should have been a blockbuster.
But seriously, it’s a mess. A glorious mess.
It’s like the craziest game of Dungeons & Dragons you ever played, filled with info about magic and strange lands that feel like they were invented five minutes before the camera started rolling. It has the most awesome weapon ever seen in probably any movie ever, the Glaive, a five-pointed, spinning death boomerang that looks like something a metal band would put on the cover of an album about slaying dragons. It has monsters that look amazing.
But it also has a somewhat boring hero and heroine surrounded by much more interesting friends. And it’s long and nonsensical.
Yet I love it. I’ve watched it so many times, and with every viewing I love it more and more, while remaining fully aware of its faults. It’s that kind of movie, I guess — the kind where every problem becomes part of the charm. The pacing is weird. The tone shifts all over the place. Characters appear, get a cool weapon, deliver one line and die. But the movie is so earnest about its insanity that you can’t help but admire it. It’s a movie that believes completely in itself, even when it absolutely shouldn’t.
Director Peter Yates (Bullit; Mother, Jugs and Speed; The Deep; Breaking Away; The Dresser) described making Krull as “complicated” and “enormous.” Special effects artist Brian Johnson took that even further, saying that Yates hated working on the film so much that in the middle of shooting, he took a vacation to the Caribbean for three weeks.
Which, honestly, is the most relatable thing anyone has ever done while making a giant fantasy epic.
Yet when Yates first took on the project, he was excited. His previous films were grounded in reality, and he considered Krull a challenge since he would have to rely on imagination and experimentation. That’s admirable, but it also means the movie sometimes feels like a very serious British filmmaker trying to wrangle a script written by someone who had just discovered heavy-metal album covers and pulp science-fiction paperbacks at the same time.
The movie begins with a narrator (Freddie Jones, Goodbye Gemini, Son of Dracula) telling of a prophecy: “This, it was given to me to know…that many worlds have been enslaved by the Beast and his army, the Slayers. And this, too, was given me to know…that the Beast would come to our world, the world of Krull, and his Black Fortress would be seen in the land. That the smoke of burning villages would darken the sky, and the cries of the dying echo through deserted valleys. But one thing I cannot know, whether the prophecy be true, that a girl of ancient name shall become queen, that she shall choose a king, and that together they shall rule our world, and that their son shall rule the galaxy.”
Right away, the movie tips its hand: this isn’t just a fantasy movie. It’s a fantasy movie that suddenly remembers it’s also science fiction. The villain’s fortress is actually a spaceship. The bad guys are alien stormtroopers. There’s prophecy, lasers, medieval kingdoms, and cosmic destiny, all mashed together like someone tossed Star Wars, Excalibur, and a pile of fantasy novels into a blender and hit puree.
On the day of Prince Colwyn and Princess Lyssa’s wedding that will unite the warring kingdoms of Krull, the Beast and his army of demonic Slayers arrive in the Black Fortress, a mountain-shaped spacecraft that randomly teleports to a different location every day just to make the heroes’ quest even more annoying. They kill both kings, wipe out the armies and kidnap Lyssa before anyone can even finish the reception.
The injured Prince Colwyn is brought back by Ynyr, the Old One (also played by Freddie Jones), who tells him of the legend of the Glaive, a legendary weapon that can kill the Beast. Colwyn and Ynry form a party with the magician Ergo (David Battley, Mr. Turkentine from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) and nine criminals who are undertaking the mission to clear their names: the multi-married axe-wielding Kegan (a super young Liam Neeson), Torquil, Rhun (Robbie Coltrane), dagger-loving Bardolph, bo staff user Oswyn, Menno and Darro, the whip users, net-throwing Nennog (stuntman Bronco McLoughlin) and Quain the archer. Soon they’re joined by Rell the cyclops Bernard Bresslaw, who is also in Hawk the Slayer, who belongs to a race cursed with the ability to see their own deaths in the future, which is a pretty bleak superpower.
From here, the movie becomes a fantasy road trip full of weird encounters. They visit the Emerald Seer, who can magically locate the Black Fortress with a crystal. Unfortunately, the Beast can reach through magic Skype calls and crush people from afar, so that plan ends badly. The bad guys are tenacious, killing everyone they can, including Darro, Menno and the Seer, even taking on the scryer’s form before he’s uncovered. That evil Beast even tries to get a woman to seduce Colwyn, but our hero is a little too smart for that.
Meanwhile, Ynyr visits the Widow of the Web, one of the film’s most bizarre sequences. She lives in a web-covered lair guarded by a giant Crystal Spider that honestly looks like something out of a prog rock album cover. She tells Ynyr where the Black Fortress will appear and gives him enchanted sand that will allow him to travel back instantly.
But the moment he leaves the protective sand circle, the spider kills her, because Krull is a movie that absolutely refuses to let anyone have a happy ending. Honestly, this movie is exactly like playing D&D with a dungeon master who has way too many ideas and refuses to throw any of them away. There’s a world of adventure, and yet people keep getting killed left and right as the heroes stumble around trying to keep up with the plot.
Finally, Colwyn does what we wanted all along: he throws the Glaive into the Beast and then, to destroy its counterattack, he and Lyssa get married and shoot fire at the monster, sending the Black Fortress into space.
Only Colwyn, Lyssa, Torquil, Oswyn, Ergo and Titch survive. The newly married couple becomes king and queen, with Torquil being named Lord Marshal of their newly combined kingdom. As the survivors run through a field, the narrator repeats the prophecy that the son of the queen and her chosen king shall rule the galaxy.
Krull was shot on 23 sets, ten of them at Pinewood Studios, including the monstrous 007 Stage. 16 Clydesdales were trained for months to be Fire Mares. Hundreds of costumes were sewn. 40 stuntmen were on hand. You’ll marvel at just how much money was thrown at a movie that has a completely incomprehensible story.
And yet, despite all that money and effort, the story somehow still feels like it was invented by a teenager who got ridiculously high with all of his friends and attempted to be the dungeon master before having the giggles and passing out.
The posters said, “Beyond our time, beyond our universe . . . there is a planet besieged by alien invaders, where a young king must rescue his love from the clutches of the Beast. Or risk the death of his world. KRULL. A world light-years beyond your imagination.”
They weren’t kidding. Krull is a movie that throws absolutely everything it can at the screen: magic weapons, prophecy, aliens, cyclopes, giant spiders, teleporting fortresses, flaming horses and a hero who spends most of the movie trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
I agree with the poster, though. I love this movie in spite of itself. Maybe even because of itself. It’s big, dumb, ambitious, messy and completely sincere. It’s not afraid to be strange or ridiculous or wildly over the top.
And for that, I salute it.
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