Review: Krull (1983)

Let’s go back to the early eighties for a bit, where both fantasy and scifi were booming, as well as science fantasy to go on top of all that! We had Star Wars, we had the Dungeons and Dragons boom, and we had folks trying to make bank from all of that! Recently we had another DND movie, but instead, I’ll be taking a look at a certain pile of bemusement called Kroll. Let’s see if there’s anything here that’s still worth a peek forty years on, or whether you’d be better off sticking to the music video for The Safety Dance.

The film opens with what it does have as strengths—a sense of visuals, and the admittedly rather neat score by James Horner. While certainly competent, it also reminds me that Horner, who did approximately eighty-six trillion scores in the mid-eighties alone, tended to re-use a lot of leitmotifs and elements, and, well, if you’ve seen enough stuff as I have your ears will certainly be prickling in familiarity throughout. 

Anyhoo, after a lavish shot of, erm, a castle flying through space, we end up with our narrator telling us that a really, really bad guy called The Beast has invaded this idyllic fantasy world of Krull, because of some prophecy or something. Supposedly there’s all manner of mayhem being caused by his forces of worm-armor-golem things, but then we very quickly come into one of the main issues here—that despite it being in the title, there’s very little of Krull to go on. Even contemporary fantasy flicks like Conan gave us a feel for the worlds they sought to display, much less the incredibly memorable elements the original Star Wars had on offer—here, all we get is a castle sitting out completely isolated in a middle of nowhere field. Minas Tirith, this isn’t. 

Let's see, we can start with some worldbuilding about...erm...that rock in the lower right?

Either way, to save the day, the two ruling dynasties have decided to put aside their differences and unite in a betrothal between their respective scions of Colwyn (Ken Marshall) and Lyssa (Lystte Anthony). For those of you already making Red Wedding references in your head, well, you’re not far off, for soon our hordes of laser-spewing bad guys show off to—you’ll never guess this—abduct the princess! And that they do, leaving our hero to go on a rather convoluted quest to rescue her and defeat The Beast, with a growing party starting out with Freddie Jones’ archetypal mentor character, soon to be joined by a group of brigands led by Alun Armstrong and incorporating a very young Liam Neeson. 

A lot of the cast is actually doing the best they have with what they go, as you come to expect with a lot of the classically-trained actors here. The main issue is that our actual leads are so boring that they might as well be cardboard signs on the set marked ‘insert personality traits here’. Colwyn is a young brave swashbuckling hero who always does the right thing…and that’s about it. There’s no sense of struggle with him as you get with other such heroes, and he spends a lot of the film bumbling around on the suggestions of others. Lyssa is another cutout mumbling about the power of love, and she certainly isn’t a patch on Carrie Fisher as far as movie princesses go. 

"Why are you all looking at the guy behind me? Between my blandness and complete lack of memorable features, I'm on my way to the top!" 

Having said all that, there are at least more memorable elements with the visuals—the interior of the villain’s castle is actually a real cool vista of weird, darkly surreal interiors that feel at times like Van Gogh meeting HR Giger, and I dig that. Unfortunately, we then get to Beast himself, who is shot with strange kaleidoscope patterns a lot of the time to cover up the fact that, well, he looks like the extremely inbred cousin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Hooray. 

There’s a few other actually compelling moments, most of them involving Freddie Jones, whose elderly sage character gets miles more development than anyone else, fleeting as it may be. The rest is largely the characters running around from one convenient stop to the next, but I will say, this is probably the only film where the power of love manifests as a jet of napalm shooting out of the hand. 

Overall, there’s enough glimmers of half-decent visuals and moments in Krull that I can see why it has some cult appeal for folks of a certain generation—but if you were looking for a substitute to the latest season of the Witcher or something, this probably won’t be that. For seekers of sincere but very cheesy eighties fantasy, this offers the goods, but that’s about it…