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When I was a child, I thought Krull was the name of the magical throwing star the main character uses in the 1983 movie Krull. Then I grew up, and realized Krull was the name of the main character himself. Then I grew old, and realized Krull was the name of the planet. This column is about the 1983 sci-fi/fantasy adventure movie, Krull. Krull is the story of Krull, and everything is Krull.
Krull was a series of grand mistakes stacked together into something greater, like piling up loose hand grenades to find you’ve inadvertently created Donatello’s David. It was directed by Peter Yates, who had a resume full of gritty crime movies about car chases and heists, like Bullitt. The perfect guy to direct a high fantasy adventure with no crime, heists, or chases. But in 1983 sci-fi/fantasy was hot, and the budget was a staggering 30 million dollars. Peter Yates thought Krull was his ticket into blockbuster American genre movies.
Krull had other ideas.
Producer Ron Silverman wanted to make a Dungeons & Dragons movie, but there was a problem with the licensing, in that he didn’t want to pay for it. At all. So he hired Stanford Sherman, the guy who wrote Ice Pirates, to pen an original script that only resembled a D&D campaign. The studio didn’t like the final result, because it was a D&D campaign by the guy who wrote Ice Pirates. Instead they hired serious playwright Steven Tesich, who turned in an artful, dialogue-intensive character script.
They went back to the Ice Pirates guy.
But not before building several wildly expensive sets based on the Tesich scenes they just scrapped, so Sherman had to rewrite his own script again based on sets from scenes nobody liked. At no point during the making of Krull did any one single person understand what Krull was supposed to be, including me, who still calls everything and everyone in it “Krull.”
It’s a bunch of hilarious fuckups crashing together to make a charming movie, but there is one perfect scene in Krull. I want to talk about it, but it requires some grounding to understand. So let me give you the gist of Krull: The planet Krull has been invaded by The Beast, who sure looks like a Krull to me. He and his army of Slayers – Krulls, the lot of them – ransack an unnamed kingdom that I’m going to call Krull.
The prince of a rival kingdom, Colwyn Krull, is set to marry Lyssa Krull to secure an alliance of the Krulls. It’s the only hope they have of standing against the Krull Beast’s army of Krulls. Both Colwyn and Lyssa’s fathers are against it, but it’s too late: They’ve already been fucking for years and the whole Beast from beyond the stars thing was just a happy coincidence.
The marriage ceremony is the cornerstone of this movie, so pay attention: Colwyn, as the groom, must put a torch out in a bowl of water, which is called “giving fire to water.” They tell Lyssa her job as the bride is to “take fire from the water,” and then they all turn to look at her because they’re a bunch of assholes. It’s a strange prank. Perhaps this is meant to shame women into compliance early in the marriage. But Lyssa simply reaches into the bowl of water and produces a fireball in her hand.
It’s the only magic any of them will do, and nobody blinks at it. “Yep, this is how all marriages go here in Krull, which is either the town, country, or planet we’re on,” the movie seems to say. Lyssa does nothing with this fireball, even as Slayers attack the ceremony. Here’s what the Slayers look like:
They’re terrifying, Guyver-armored bugbots. Those things they’re holding are Star Wars style laser blasters. Here’s what the good guys look like:
Those things they’re holding are the lasers they’re getting blasted by.
I tried to find a scene where the citizens of Krull weren’t getting laser-blasted to oblivion, but there isn’t one. I adore how Krull brings sci-fi tropes into a world of fantasy and the two sides aren’t depicted as equal but different. Science wins, dipshit. One side shoots laser blasts, and the other eats laser blasts. But like everything in this movie, it was not on purpose. The fight choreography originally called for sprawling swashbuckling scenes between the Krullers and the Slayers, and then the Slayers showed up in eighty pounds of foam rubber with no eye-holes. So now, instead of backflipping, they laser blast. And instead of parrying a backflip strike, the good guys die to laser blasts.
The Slayers abduct Lyssa and kill everyone but Colwyn, who is rescued by a mysterious stranger named Ynyr. Ynyr tells him about the Glaive – a mystical throwing star, and this universe’s version of Excalibur. I have always called it a Krull, and it’s too late to change now. Maybe that’s because a glaive is already an actual weapon, and it’s not that one. It’s a blade on a stick, not a giant shuriken. But either nobody knew, or cared enough to look up whatever “fantasy bullshit” a glaive is, and that’s the origin of the raddest weapon in sci-fi/fantasy.
Colwyn finds the Glaive hidden in an ancient volcano, but to avoid confusion I’ll be calling it a Krull from now until I die. Colwyn’s first test is to reach into a pool of molten placenta to retrieve the Krull.
Colwyn pulls out a weird black rock, and he is not impressed. Then he knocks some of the rock loose, and finds out it’s a sweet throwing star.
He’s into it. Then he turns his hand just so, and realizes it’s a switchblade throwing star-
He’s completely in love, and so am I. I used to build popsicle stick Krulls and whip them at my friends, screaming “KRULL” as they exploded. I might again.
Colwyn’s so fucking excited about his Krull. It’s adorable. Ken Marshall, the actor who plays Colwyn, keeps the role pretty straight. He’s a cocky Errol Flynn-type and has one shit-eating expression throughout the movie. He does try an emotional crying scene at one point, and it is not convincing. But he nails Colwyn’s child-like reaction to finding a switchblade throwing star – he comes bounding down the mountain and leaps out of the rocks behind Ynyr. He doesn’t say a word, just takes an excited breath, runs up to him, then cocks his arm back to Krull the shit out of the place. It is the universal body language of a child about to say “check this shit out” before losing his favorite toy forever.
Ynyr just grabs his arm and tells him to knock it off. It’s not the right time. Daddy’s hungover and he does not feel like going to fetch a Krull out of a tree for a crying Colwyn.
Now that Krull has the Krull, he can save the planet Krull by finding and defeating the Krull Beast in his Krull Fortress. Along the way, they recruit a ragtag band of charming misfits, every single one named Krull as far as I’m concerned.
There’s Ergo, a shape-shifting wizard and comic relief whose spells always go awry. Think Orko, and then don’t think a second thing. It’s just Orko.
There’s a group of bandits led by the roguish Torquil-
With a few famous faces appearing in early roles. Liam Neeson’s here-
And Robbie Coltrane, who played Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies and also retroactively in every other movie you see him in.
There’s the cyclops, Rell, who gave up one eye to the Krull Beast in exchange for the power to see the future. But the Krull Beast double-crossed him, and the only future he can see is the day he dies. Rell has a sick trident that one-shots everything in Krull, and he’d be the main character if he didn’t look like this.
In true Krull tradition, they got so carried away covering actor Bernard Bresslaw’s face in cyclops makeup they forgot to make eyeholes. He had one tiny opening off to the side as an afterthought. He couldn’t see shit. Then they put him in lifts to make him appear bigger. Most of act two takes place in a swamp, and Bernard Bresslaw spent most of act two falling into that swamp.
The Krull Party also picks up The Blind Emerald Seer, the only one who can foretell where the Krull Beast’s Krull Fortress will appear. I hate him. His very existence traumatized me as a child. He was my least favorite monster in Krull, even when he’s just a normal guy with no special effects makeup. He looks like a sick cocker spaniel who bleeds when you pet it.
The Seer keeps a young and unexplained boy.
It’s probably supposed to be a wholesome apprentice role, and it might actually scan like that if the Seer didn’t look like a mummy filled with wasps. Seriously, this guy fucked me up so bad as a kid. I still have trauma response just looking at his face, and that’s before he was replaced by a black-eyed changeling.
Who died by melting into a giant plague boil.
Just his dry, empty skin burrowing away into the earth to find you, to find and taste your feet every time you take your sandals off at the beach.
All the wizards are fucked in this movie. The unexplained boy is sad about his worm-father dissolving, so Ergo the shape-shifter does something strange to comfort him. Here’s the catch: Earlier in the movie, Ergo turned into a goose and was shown talking with his own voice, with his own mind. He doesn’t fully transform into these animals, there’s still a middle-aged man’s brain in there. So yes, this next bit could have been cute-
If you didn’t know that puppy is still Ergo. That’s a middle-aged British man pawing at a distraught young boy. That is Ergo thinking “I’m going to crawl into this boy’s lap.” That is Ergo thinking “I shall now lick the young child’s face.” There’s no way the makers of Krull intended this, they just didn’t think about any of the worldbuilding – which is a very Krull thing to do.
Now that the team’s assembled, many grand adventures are had – Ynyr hooks up with his ex, a giant milk spider; another black-eyed changeling tries to bang Colwyn while Lyssa and the Krull Beast watch on spectral pervert vision; the party steals a bunch of fire horses and just tear ass across the country like a 20 year-old Air Force cadet destined to die in a souped-up Mazda. If it feels like I’m hand-waving the best parts, that’s because so did the director. Peter Yates hated directing Krull so much he took an unplanned three-week trip to the Caribbean in the middle of filming. That’s an insane thing to do, abruptly stopping production on a major motion picture to take a vacation. Amongst several others, Krull was booking the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios, one of the largest and most expensive in the world. Yates’ meltdown alone probably accounts for a third of Krull’s $30 million dollar budget.
The Krull Party arrives at the Krull Fortress, and beloved characters like Krull, Krull, and Cyclops Krull make the ultimate sacrifice for the grand finale. One of them was nearly actor Ken Marshall. There’s a scene in the movie where it looks like a death trap opens beneath his feet, nearly crushing him. Using movie magic, the makers of Krull accomplished this by building the exact death trap and throwing Ken Marshall into it.
That floor isn’t foam rubber, there’s no little safety switch to detect resistance and pull back. It’s a massive hydraulic press built to crush men, and everyone in the scene simply practiced not getting crushed by it. Ken Marshall did his own stunts, but sometimes he let the stuntmen practice them. You might recognize that as complete madness, and you would have been fired from the set of Krull for being a buzzkill. It was the stuntmen who practiced timing the deathtrap, until Ken Marshall came in and sent them away for the real deal. He took a little longer saying his lines than they did in practice, then jumped right into the jaws.
The timing was off by five seconds, exactly how long it takes a hydraulic press to split a man in half. Only one crew member noticed this and slowed the machine down in time.
Meaning this expression was real.
It’s now time for Colwyn to face the Beast, who takes the form of an R-Type boss, complete with orbs. Colwyn unleashes the Krull for the very first time. You’re expecting a monumental fight scene in the face of great adversity. Nope. No. Nuh uh. It’s a one-shot. Fish types are weak to Krulling.
Fuck yeah, Krull! It’s such a rad fantasy weapon. Sure, it doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but it absolutely wrecks shop when it does.
We’ve arrived at the scene I wanted to talk about, but just a quick recap: Krull was directed by the wrong man from a script written twice by the same guy, around setpieces his fired replacement invented, on way too big a budget, whose fight scenes all had to be scrapped because nobody factored foam rubber underwear into a backflip. This movie broke its director’s mind and nearly ate its lead actor. I love it dearly, I would not say it’s competent art.
Except for one scene. The scene after Colwyn finally Krulls the shit out of the Krull Beast, then opens his hand for the Krull to come back.
In any other movie, this scene takes a few seconds. Luke realizes the lightsaber is less important than the lives of his friends or whatever. It’s accomplished with a little frown and a quick cutaway.
In Krull, this scene takes about five minutes. It’s easily the most high-effort sequence in the film. Peter Yates slow-plays the whole thing, ramping up dramatic tension before cutting away just to build it up again. Ken Marshall acts the holy shit out of this scene in a way he simply does not bother to anywhere else in the movie. Remember he had a moment at the start where he cried over his dead entire kingdom. That involved making a constipated face and whimpering for four seconds. That’s because Ken Marshall was saving it so he could leave his heart on the floor here: For the scene where an excited child loses his sick-ass toy after playing with it for the very first time.
If you’ve ever had a remote control car go down a sewer drain on Christmas morning, you know this pain.
Look at the despair and madness on his face. He’s sweating, he’s crying, he’s smiling and breaking all at once. He just wants his Krull! And the awful thing is… the Krull wants him back. It’s trying, you guys. The Krull is trying so hard.
But it can’t break free of the Beast’s flesh.
Over and over again, we cut from the Krull ripping itself apart trying to get back to its master, to Ken Marshall channeling child-death trauma to pour his very soul into this, the throwing star retrieval scene.
But it’s no good. With the Krull Beast dead, the Krull Fortress is collapsing, and Colwyn Krull’s precious Krull is lost forever. He must flee with Lyssa Krull, his true love, before they’re both crushed.
Lyssa gives Colwyn a meaningful look, no words need to be shared.
And then he goes back in for the Krull.
We cut back to Lyssa just for this expression.
He ditches her to get his throwing star back! He’s the most relatable hero in movie history. Colwyn heads into the Beast’s lair to reach for his Krull, but the Beast awakens again, forcing him and Lyssa to flee. Luckily, Lyssa realizes the power of badass remote-control switchblade throwing stars was inside them all along. A beautiful sentiment. She opens her hand, and reveals… the marriage fireball.
Oh, right! She was always a pyromancer, from the very start of the film. We just fucking forgot about that, because this is Krull, baby. It’s less a script and more of a vibe.
The Krull Beast tries its orb shot again, but that’s nothing before the power of love.
The Krull Fortress collapses, the Krull Beast dies, the Krull is lost forever, but Krull has been saved by its champions, the newlyweds Colwyn and Lyssa Krull. And sure, maybe sometimes Colwyn dreams of Krull, the one he lost. The switchblade shuriken-shaped hole he will always feel in his heart. But he has something better now.
It’s the power of love.
Which is a flamethrower.
Love is a flamethrower.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Autumn Armstrong-Berg who is going to flip the fuck out if they get hit with one more popsicle stick Krull.