Column 80s Fantasy Film Club Krull Deserves a Bigger Cult Following — Who’s With Me? Is this a good movie? Debatable. Is it an *awesome* movie? Hell yeah it is. By Tyler Dean | Published on December 9, 2025 Credit: Columbia Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Columbia Pictures In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the ’80s are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since. For a more in-depth introduction to the series, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time, we looked at a singularly dark interpretation of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books with 1985’s Return to Oz. This time we are delving into the sui generis fantasia that is 1983’s Krull. I didn’t see Krull until about seven or eight years ago, but it instantly became one of my favorite films. The film and I are almost exactly the same age (it’s about two months younger than I) which helps me justify the fact that, in 2021, I celebrated my 38th birthday with a socially distanced outdoor screening of this movie. So let’s dive in! Krull is a strange one. Standing boldly astride the Fantasy/Sci Fi divide, the story is set on the titular planet, a world of magic that has been subjugated by an alien warlord called the Beast. Prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall, of Deep Space 9 fame) and his fiancée, Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony—redubbed by Lindsay Crouse) are attacked on their wedding day. Lyssa is stolen away by the Beast and his Slayers, prompting Colwyn to embark on a quest to win her back and topple the Beast’s rule. He is joined by the sage Ynyr (The Elephant Man’s Freddie Jones), the shapeshifting wizard Ergo, a blind seer, along with his young apprentice, Titch, as well as an oracular cyclops and a band of thieves led by the lovable rogue, Torquil (played by Alun Armstrong—RSC member, Penny Dreadful luminary, and star of more than a few BBC adaptations of Dickens novels). Fun fact: Torquil’s merry men include Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane, both relatively early in their respective film careers. Colwyn and company conquer crystalline spiders, changeling assassins, and the Beast’s laser-toting, armored Slayers on their way to the forbidding Black Fortress, where Lyssa has been imprisoned. Along the way, Colwyn fulfills a prophecy by retrieving the mythical “Glaive,” a weapon that resembles a vaguely sentient, bladed starfish. He finally comes into his full powers after marrying Lyssa, thereby fulfilling another prophecy, and destroys the Beast, liberating Krull and giving the survivors a happy ending.  So, how does Krull hold up? I already tipped my hand in the intro, but Krull is fucking great! It strikes the perfect balance of engaging and stupid. It takes itself just seriously enough as it’s pushing its absolutely gonzo vision of its fantasy world to be thoroughly enjoyable, even if the viewer doesn’t take it quite as seriously… If I had to point to a single quality that makes Krull so delightful, it would be a fearlessness with regards to its worldbuilding. Released the same year as Return of the Jedi, Krull clearly takes the Star Wars approach of confidently launching its original story in the kind of lived-in world whose history feels much deeper than what is actually explained on screen. Unlike Star Wars, however, it basically eschews all exposition, to both its credit and its detriment.  Take, for example, a third act plot point where Ynyr must visit a character who has rated only the briefest mention up to this point in the film: The Widow of the Web, an ancient sorceress (Francesca Annis) who lives in a crystal at the center of a huge web guarded by the aforementioned crystalline spider. We learn, in very short order, that the Widow has some sort of control over the flow of time, that Ynyr and the Widow once had a son which the Widow killed shortly after his birth, that the Widow is also named Lyssa, and that she is willing to sacrifice herself to save the other Lyssa by providing Ynar with just enough time to deliver vital information to Colwyn. That’s a lot of plot, and there is almost no other context for any of it. In most movies, that sort of dense plotting would require an entire act of a film to set up and explore and Krull burns through it in a scene that lasts, at most, five minutes. Imagine if Obi-Wan just shouted out a laundry list of all his past entanglements with Darth Vader in the two minutes before their duel and none of it was ever mentioned anywhere else in the film.  That’s definitely not to Krull’s credit (and there is a reason taking the same approach as Star Wars doesn’t necessarily lead to Star Wars-esque success) but at the same time, there is something so matter-of-fact and unforced about the whole of Ynar and the Widow’s backstory that one finds oneself intrigued rather than impatient. Krull, despite being an original property (producer Ron Silverman claims the original prompt for the film was inspired by Dungeons & Dragons), feels like it is using remarkable economy of storytelling to cram in details from much more complex and capacious source material. It’s a movie that feels designed to make viewers question if there wasn’t a trilogy of forgotten fantasy novels on which it was based. Everything about the story—from its magical wedding rites and its ancient rivalries between noble houses to the Glaive itself—somehow manages to feel deeper and more engaging than it is. To this end, Krull boasts a production design that leans, tantalizingly, into its blending of sci-fi and fantasy. Knights wear tunics straight out of a 1960s BBC Shakespeare adaptation alongside smooth, ceramic-looking armor that suggests either that the peoples of Krull have adopted fabrication techniques from the Beast or else were a more technologically advanced society before he came to the planet (Torquil’s spiked collar and chainmail mantle are particular highlights). Likewise, there is a charming faux-Medieval brutalist quality to some of the castle sets that feels inspired by Cedric Gibbons’ in-world sets for Kiss Me Kate (1953) or Mary Blair’s design for the exterior of “It’s a Small World.”  Some of that geometric, minimalist brutalism also gets repurposed to far more intimidating effect for Lyssa’s scenes in the Beast’s Black Fortress which, from the outside, looks like a glacier-carved rock formation along the lines of Devils Postpile or the Giant’s Causeway. From the inside, the fortress is vaguely implied to be the body of the Beast itself, with apertures shaped like eyes, huge curling bridges studded with teeth, and claw-like spirals through which Lyssa meanders. The film never explains whether the twenty-foot-tall reptilian baboon that manifests as the Beast late in the film is the true body of the creature or if Lyssa has been wandering around its bones and organs the entire time. Similarly, there is no explanation given for the humanoid, glass-helmeted spacesuits of the Beast’s Slayers which release grotesque slug-like creatures, reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing, that burrow into the earth when their shell is damaged. It is implied the slugs are the Slayers themselves and the humanoid suits are mecha they pilot, but any real explanation feels tantalizingly beyond the grasp of the film, not out of laziness, but because the humans and Cyclopes of Krull would have no way to unravel those extraterrestrial mysteries.  This is not to say the Krull doesn’t have its low points. Neither Colwyn nor Lyssa is particularly engaging as a lead (and, in the latter case, Lyssa is done no favors by the mismatch between her body acting and her dubbed lines), and for every fascinating choice or odd plot point, there is a plodding scene of our adventurers trudging through the grim ocher swamps of Pinewood Studios. Even some of the costume design falls flat: Robbie Coltrane appears to just be wearing a sturdy pair of builder’s coveralls. The presence of two different wise old mentor figures also feels quite unnecessary. Still, there are cast highlights as well. David Battley, who seems to be channeling Eric Idle (with whom he’d worked a few years earlier), manages to mine some charming comic relief from his role as the initially selfish and self-important wizard, Ergo the Magnificent, and gives one of the best line deliveries in B-movie history when, after pestering the seer’s young apprentice for sweets, he introduces himself and lists his many (self-bestowed) titles. The boy responds that it’s all very impressive and introduces himself as simply Titch…a name to which Ergo responds cheerfully, “That’s not impressive, but it is adequate! Adequate.” All in all, Krull is wildly stylish with only the barest hint of real substance that never actually manifests, but I would argue that still puts it ahead of many other fantasy films of the day.  Krull was a box office flop and, even if it’s been more fondly remembered in the 42 years since it was released, it has never achieved as extensive a cult status as, say Fire and Ice, or even the far less interesting Beastmaster. So let’s talk about what impact it has had in the decades since. Most of its pop cultural afterlife has been centered around its magical weapon: the Glaive. I want to start out with the obvious. A glaive (sometimes called a glaive-guisarmes) is a real weapon—a polearm culminating in a sword-like blade, similar to a naginata. You will note that the Glaive in Krull is nothing like that. It’s a psychically controlled shuriken that mostly works like a bandsaw. In addition to causing an endless amount of confusion among nerds about what a glaive actually is, the boomeranging throwing star/chakram has been a popular archetype in fantasy games ever since: Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft games prominently feature a “glaive thrower,” a sort of Krull-style glaive-launching ballista; Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon has a “killstar” that functions the same way; a personal favorite—2001’s Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura—calls its glaive-type weapon “Azram’s Star;” and so many of the chakram and bladed boomerang-type weapons seen in Xena: Warrior Princess to Secret of Mana to the Smart Discs of the Predator franchise may be directly inspired by, or at least owe some of their raison d’etre to, fond memories of Krull.  While far from the first piece of media to blend science fiction and fantasy (Anne McCaffrey and Frank Herbert were doing it back in the ’60s and, obviously, Star Wars was the ascendant speculative fiction of the day when Krull was released) there is a particular subgenre of medieval-ish fantasy worlds invaded by sci-fi forces that feel like they owe much to Krull. The Dungeons & Dragons space fantasy setting Spelljammer certainly seems to have taken aesthetic notes from Krull, as do the foundational Japanese RPG series Super Hydlide and Phantasy Star. While Krull was released a couple years after C.J. Cherryh’s Pride of Chanur, you can see the influence of both in early ’90s fantasy like C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy, or in the way that Games Workshop kept elements of period-specific fantasy when it launched Warhammer 40000, its space opera counterpart to its established Lovecraftian-Horror-in-the-Holy-Roman-Empire-but-make-it-anti-Thatcherite setting. As a final note, Krull is also likely to have had a lasting impact on the twelve couples who were married on a version of the Krull set as part of one of the weirdest promotions in the history of cinema. I’m not saying that I would want to have a Krull-themed wedding—who am I kidding, I would adore that—but I am saying that getting married as a promotion for a film (particularly one that wouldn’t be released for another month or so and wasn’t based on any sort of known franchise) is the kind of thing that we should do more often. Think of the Rebel Moon weddings we missed out on!  But what do you think? Is Krull an accidentally brilliant piece of ’80s fantasy or is it yet another, plodding dud saddled with an underbaked plot? Do we stan Rell the Cyclops, and his unbelievably drawn-out death sequence? Is baby Liam Neeson’s facial hair worse in Krull or Excalibur? What do you think a glaive is? Please share your thoughts in the comments, and be sure to join us next time when we go from a film that somehow gives the impression that it’s drawing from a deep (if nonexistent) well of lore and source material to one whose source material is a plotless treatise on dragon physiology with Rankin/Bass’ 1982 animated classic The Flight of Dragons![end-mark] The post <i>Krull</i> Deserves a Bigger Cult Following — Who’s With Me? appeared first on Reactor.