Krull – Memory Lane

memorylane.jpgAh, Krull, does anyone even remember Krull? If you do, you can imagine how useful it’ll be. We can show our grandkids Lord of the Rings and then show them Krull (and Beastmaster, and even Willow) and they can pity us. We’d then stamp our feet and sputter “But we LIKED it!”  – it was all we had.

 Krull is an awful movie… awful in a way that’s especially wonderful if you see it as a starry-eyed tween. True love wins in the most obviously literal way possible and … ok, that spider was damn cool!

Oh, guess what? A “glaive” is not a 5 pointed throwing disc thing! It’s a polearm from France. Krull made for the stupidest D&D arguments EVER!

The Video Game

Krull was also a mediocre video game.  Video games made from movies tend to stink. Krull didn’t stink (defying the odds) but it was derivative.

Krull began on the arcade but a 2600 version was released and is still a hot collectible today and there was a Pinball version as well. Like many games of it’s time it was three games in one. First you had to run up a hill dodging boulders and collecting peices of your weapon: the (historically inaccurate) Glaive. Then you had to play a Robotron style game and save your army from Slayers. Then you had to assault the fortress, and save your men again. And then a final showdown and… where the hell are all those men you saved now that you need them?

Such are video games.

10 Responses to “Krull – Memory Lane”

  1. With a young Liam Neeson, no less 🙂 Gotta love these ‘so bad it is hilarious’ movies 😀

  2. Krull’s existence sticks in my mind more than Krull itself, as it was one of the first movies I remember my uncle bringing home from his workplace’s “video club”. Were they popular in the US? Do you even know what I’m talking about?

    Also, I thought Lysette Anthony was incredibly hot.

  3. Those cheesy early 80’s barbarian/fantasy movies were hilarious.

    I remember the Krull game. It was hard. –Cary

  4. OMG! Holy Flashback Batman!! I remember playing that game over and over again. Yikes!

  5. 80’s fantasy movies rock!!! Anyone remember Hawk the Slayer?
    http://www.badmovies.org/movies/hawkslayer/

  6. Wow … I couldn’t recall Hawk, but when I saw the screens it immediately jumped back to me … I saw it on cable in the 80’s …

  7. That movie was awful, but not as bad as some of the other fantasy/sci fi from that era.

    Yor, the Hunter from the Future
    The Sword and the Sorcerer
    Deathstalker

  8. Hey! I HAD that argument about what a glaive was! To make it worse, one of the Thomas Covenant novels refers to a character’s sword as a “glaive”, and we argued constantly about what the heck a glaive was, anyway, culminating in a brief joke adventure where EVERY NPC had a glaive, broad glaive, 2 handed glaive, composite long glaive, or throwing glaive.

    Ah, Krull. You seemed so good at Age 8, and so terribly, terribly bad by Age… 9.

  9. The kids found this down at our local Schlockbuster on a hot summer day when they couldn’t think of anything else they wanted to rent. They showed it to me, and asked me what it was. I was taken back to a time long ago, and in a galaxy VERY far away.

    It was 1983, and me and several of my friends lived for fantasy. We played D&D, and wrote our own fiction and had a budding Villejo-ette too, so we had our own custom bad fantasy beefcake as well. We saw all these as they came out. We had even snuck into Conan the Barbarian.

    We didn’t have to sneak into Krull. We all cadged a way to spend the night at one friend’s house and her Dad drove us all down to the only theater in town. We sat down, and were blown away by James Horner’s theme, and settled down to a good time.

    It had it all! Really cool five-bladed throwing knives, and really bad striped pants on the lead actor. Lord how we made fun of those pants. I still do.

    Then the kids poked me worriedly, calling me back to today. We rented it, and went home. After dinner, they plugged it in. My daughters’ first reaction was, “Oh god! This thing is as old as “The Last Starfighter”, isn’t it?” I had to tell the truth. “Uh, I think it’s older.” But they shrugged, and with the first appearance of Prince Colwyn, they were hooked. The guys didn’t really get too far into it until after the Slayers showed up. The Cyclops was awarded with a, “Cool!” when he threw that lance over Ergo’s head and took out that Slayer. They didn’t recognize Robbie Coltrane when he showed up, but they did recognize Liam Neeson. The Black Fortress was “wicked” the way it was like the inside of a big monster or something. The Glaive was also “wicked”. The spider was deemed, “even better than Aragog” by our in-house Potter-file.

    In the end, they thought it was a fun film. Not great like War Games, but not awful like that Beastmaster one. Oh well. I guess I can’t win ’em all.

    If you’ve seen even one adventure epic, then you’re probably familiar with most of what happens in Krull. They filed the serial numbers off just about everything. But what the movie lacks in originality, it makes up for in style. And by that I mean a solid and adventurous, four-color comic, anti-cynic style. There are no knowing winks in this one; it’s as honest and noble a little adventure you’ll find.

    I guess that’s one of the things I love about this film. There was nothing to explain, no grown-up jokes. No anything-ist axes to grind. Just boy meets girl, monster takes girl, boy goes and gets girl back. That, plus the coolest stop-motion spider since Harryhausen, and how can you go wrong?

  10. It’s funny that this is titled Memory Lane, since there is actually a Krull Lane in Castle Rock ;-).

    And speaking of rock… this movie does ROCK! Yes, it’s hyper cheesy and simple, but it has lots of cool stuff and it was one of the first ‘super-science or sorcery’ movies (sorry, but the Slayers were more sci-fi than fantasy). I most remember the spiky-things that fired a missile/spike and then turned over to be short spears (hmm… those must have been glaives, too ). I remember the star as being more rogue than prince and the star-ess as having inhumanly large eyes. Krull is one of those movies that I bought as soon as I saw it on DVD!

    Now, talking about others in the genre… DeathStalker was a movie I searched for years trying to find it in rental places or anywhere after I saw it one time on cable. DeathStalker 2 is actually the best of the 4 of them (the star in that one reminds me of Krull). Sword and the Sorceror had the most awesomest sword before Luke wielded a LightSaber… and was the first fantasy movie I saw that was creepy just for creepy’s sake (the beast peeling off the human body… ).

    But no one’s mentioned Dragon Slayer or Legend or Clash of the Titans! More B movie fantasy fun!

    Oh, and the Krull game was REALLY hard! I never made it past the slayers of the 2nd phase. 🙁

    Thanks for the memories!

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