Picture this: it’s 1982 in the USA. Pictures like The Empire Strikes Back and E.T.: the Extraterrestrial are making money hand over fist. Plastic recreations of aliens and spaceships jam the store shelves and family rooms of the nation. Every kid in America imagines himself doing battle with a sword, either one like Conan the Barbarian’s or one like Luke Skywalker’s. It is a brief renaissance of high-concept science-fiction and fantasy in Hollywood. What’s a screenwriter to do?
If you’re screenwriter Stanford Sherman, high off the success of Any Which Way You Can, you pump out a series of substandard genre scripts, collect your paycheck, and vanish from the Hollywood landscape. Presumably you’ve retreated to your own personal Batcave (you used to write episodes of Batman back in the ’60s) to contemplate the exact method by which your first and last names got mixed up.
Among Sherman’s roster of criminal acts scripts is Ice Pirates. Yes, Ice Pirates, a movie that manages to be even sillier than its title without including any actual humor. And then there’s The Man Who Wasn’t There, the allegedly comedic retelling of The Invisible Man starring Steve Gutenberg and filmed in that hallmark of ’80s quality: 3-D. But our story begins with the first movie in this trifecta of schlock — a movie called Krull.
I didn’t actually see Krull as a kid in the ’80s, but I sure as heck knew about it. Even in the target-rich environment of sci-fi and fantasy that was the early ’80s (a period that boasted not only Empire and E.T. but also Conan the Barbarian, Flash Gordon, Star Trek II, and Blade Runner), Krull stood out. One couldn’t walk past a magazine rack or open a comic book without being bombarded with Krull imagery — the willowy Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony) in white robes (no doubt costumed to inspire thoughts of Princess Leia), the dark eyes of the Beast hulking over his mountain lair, and of course Prince Colwyn brandishing his weapon. No, not that weapon. I’m talking about the five-armed starfish of a giant shuriken identified as The Glaive. (Renaissance festival enthusiasts surely groaned at the use of the word “glaive” — a sword or lance — as applied to this hokey throwing star, but I cringe at the use of the word “Renaissance” in reference to an event that recreates the Middle Ages, so they really don’t have a whole lot to complain about.) No matter how much the eleven-year-old me might have liked to have seen Krull, however, I suspect that even at that age I would have come to the conclusion that the picture’s marketing was decidedly better than its making.
The film opens with the arrival of Prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall) and his entourage at the gates of Lyssa’s palace. An overgenerous helping of voiceover explains that they are to be married despite the years-long war between their fathers’ kingdoms. Through this alliance they hope to unite their armies and defend their world (Krull) against the hordes of black-armored Slayers from another planet and their overlord, the Beast. Krull’s peculiar mix of fantasy and science fiction isn’t explained within the film; the audience is asked to play along with the fact that leather-clad men with swords expect to do reasonable combat against alien invaders with laser rifles. They, like we, aren’t given much choice but to accept the fact when the Slayers invade Lyssa’s castle, kidnapping Lyssa and killing the two elderly kings.
The plot moves along in a fashion as unimaginatively linear as the video games of the time. (And yes, you can bet your chain mail-clad ass there was a Krull video game.) Colwyn (now King himself) falls in with his Obi-Wan Kenobi, an old coot by the name of Ynyr (Freddie Jones). Under Ynyr’s direction, a quest for a magical weapon (the Glaive) begets a trip to a local Oracle begets a journey through a deadly swamp begets . . . well, you get the idea. It’s the dull, conventional kind of sword-and-sorcery quest that The Princess Bride would mine for laughs a scant four years later.
Colwyn is joined along the way by Ergo the bumbling magician (David Battley), a cyclops, a young boy, and a dozen or so brigands who grudgingly agree to become Colwyn’s “army” in exchange for their freedom. And hey, they’re criminals, so they make convenient cannon fodder. This is especially handy when they die in a long shot and we are absolved even of the responsibility of determining which one just bought the farm. Among these brigands are Robbie Coltrane and Liam Neeson, whose careers were just beginning. Those who like to engage in a bit of Hollywood schadenfreude will relish the fact that both men are given more than a handful of lines and well-developed exit scenes. Hollywood has its revenge, however, as we must sit through Neeson’s quips about his happily polygamous life and Coltrane’s dubbed doomsaying through the middle hour of the movie.
Ninety minutes, one giant crystal spider, and a herd of fiery-hoofed Clydesdales later (the world of Krull has ways of providing for every need when you’re a prince on a quest), Colwyn and company find their way to the Beast’s mobile mountain lair. Yes, the whole mountain moves, much like the giant stone head in Zardoz. (Not that Krull has a tenth of the entertainment value of Zardoz, intentional or otherwise, but the floating mass of granite does call that other film to mind.) At this point all heck breaks loose between the Slayers and Colwyn’s “army” in a no-holds-barred battle for control of the sound stage. I mean fortress. The Glaive lets fly (finally!), characters die, and in the end the princess will be rescued. You were expecting something else?
One’s initial instinct is to treat Krull kindly. The picture obviously wants to be a simple fantasy romp, and to hold it to standards higher than that could be considered cruel. The problem is that the script and actors keep straying past their abilities. Whether it is Ken Marshall’s giggle-inspiring grief pangs at the death of Colwyn’s father or the constantly misfiring jokes about Ergo’s vanity, cowardice, and magical amateurism, every time Krull reaches for something just a bit more than the pedestrian it actually makes the film worse. With a tag line like “a world light-years beyond your imagination,” you can imagine just how forgiving the audience feels by the end of a two-hour long slog of mediocrity.
