year 5 day 115

movie: Krull
starring:Ken Marshall, Leam Neeson
genre: Sci-fi, Fantasy
year:1983
format: Hollywood Suites Channel

plot:On the night of their wedding, a princess is taken hostage by a powerful sorcerer, leaving the prince on a mission to find the hidden castle she's been taken to.

This was one of those films where I kept thinking of about a dozen other movies. Knowing that the Dark Crystal came out a few months before, the similarities between the castle and the evil guards' armor was interesting. I also kept thinking about The Princess Bride, which came out four years after Krull (but the original novel of Princess Bride came out ten years before Krull)  There is a scene nearer to the end, where one character who happens to be a cyclops, is holding a large stone door open for his companions to crawl through, much like Sloth does in the Goonies. (the Goonies came out two years after Krull) And of course, there is the whole sword in the stone thing happening in the first half of the film, when the prince pulls a starfished-dagger out of stone. 

We've got a romance torn asunder, a dark forest filled with quicksand that drowns a few of the noble warriors, a blind wizard who gets got, a scatterbrained coward of a witch who can't get his magick right, a castle that looks like kit-kat bars, and a big bad who looks like a cross between Pumpkinhead and an overgrown Ghoulie.  (Ghoulies came out in 1984, and Pumpkinhead in 1988)

And it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. Given it is over 30 years old, the bad green screens are forgiven. The idea is solid, though the pacing at points are a little long. There are little mini-quests that happen within the larger one. For instance, the wiseman has to convince his former love, who is at the mercy of a giant spider for help, and to do so, must climb through a spider's web in a massive cave or fall to his death. There is also a scene where the hero prince and his band of hero warriors, need to tame a bunch of wild horses in order to ride half way across the planet in like a day. The horses are magickal and have blue flames that makes them fly. But the taming of them isn't really explained before hand, you just suddenly see them trying to saddle these things for like 6 minutes of air time.

I would have liked more sword fights. It needed more hand to hand swords and magick. I would have liked to know why the princess was the target of the big evil? Was it the big evil loved her or just wanted to steal the kingdom or was he bored? And how come, if the prince and princess were an arranged marriage, they were desperately in love? Are we to believe they knew each other ahead of time, or wrote letters or something? And if the prince was capable of being a human flame thrower, shouldn't the princess have been able to manipulate water too, given they created their "bond" with both elements not just the fire?

what did I learn? Krull influenced more than a few