Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Peter Yates
• Written by Stanford Sherman
• Starring
  • Ken Marshall
  • Lysette Anthony
  • Freddie Jones
  • Francesca Annis

I’ve got fond childhood memories of this one. It came out in the summer of 1983, the same year as Return of the Jedi, and my dad took us to both movies (two trips to the cinema in a single year was a rare occurence for the Shumate family). At the time, I thought Krull was only slightly less cool than Jedi, which shows you what a clueless twelve-year-old I was. Nowadays, I realize the gulf that exists between them, but I can still enjoy a showing of Krull with nary a qualm, which shows you what a clueless thirty-year-old I am.

The same-year release of both movies was no accident, as Krull incorporates several elements from the Star Wars movies. However, it also shifted the balance of the SF/fantasy equation more heavily to the fantasy side, to appeal more to the burdgeoning AD&D crowd. And along with those fantasy elements, the plot dips more fully into the fantasy ethic: JUST CUZ. Like in a fairy tale, where you shouldn’t question the idea that dragons hoard gold or that elves just like helping shoemakers, there are plenty of things you have to simply accept and move on.

Thus, when a giant mountain floating through space fills the screen (think “Star Destroyer”) as it heads toward the planet Krull (accompanied by James Horner’s derivative-of-everything score), and a voiceover informs us that this “Fortress” and its honcho, the Beast, have enslaved many other worlds, just swallow it and go with the flow.

“Why, yes — I’m glad that you’re young and hot, too!”

This mountain crunches down to earth, and out come the Slayers, the Beast’s version of stormtroopers — carapace-armored riders (that’s right, they brought their own horses from space), and swords that can also shoot lasers beams from the hilts. That sounds cool, but it makes for some terribly counterintuitive battle tactics; the Slayers regularly shoot first from a distance, then get in close and turn their swords around for hand-to-hand skirmishes. Think about it; if you had a gun and your opponents a knife, would you first take a couple of shots and then put the gun away in favor of a knife of your own? I didn’t think so.

In response, Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony) and Prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall) of rival kingdoms decide to marry, to bring their countries together as a single army to fight the Slayers. The two meet (apparently for the first time) at Lyssa’s dad’s place to solemnize the marriage. Oddly enough, the castle is just out in the middle of nowhere; we never do get a look at a town, or even a village, in this whole movie. We do, however, get a look at the odd technological milieu of Krull. Their warriors are horseborn, and use swords, but the guards have tinted plexiglass visors on their helmets. And while the castle is obviously a real one on the outside, the interior architecture (which, like most of the sets in the movie, simply screams “Shot at Pinewood Studios!”) is of an odd sort, at once both Modernist and vaguely Dali-esque.

Anyway. The marriage ceremony (which involves Colwyn plunking a torch into a basin of water and Lyssa lifting the flame back out to hand to him) is interrupted by, you got it, Slayers. A battle ensues (see previous note on Slayer tactics), full of derring-do and sparking swords, but eventually the bad guys win. In the process, they do two classic bad guy things: 1) they leave Colwyn the sole survivor (laid low by a laserblast to the shoulder), and 2) they capture and cart of Lyssa.

Colwyn is brought around next morning by Ynyr (Freddie Jones with a magnificent moustache), the fabled “Old One” from the mountains. He plasters Colwyn’s wound and rallies him to fight the Slayers and win back his princess with the help of a mystical, legendary weapon: the Glaive.

A one-eyed humanoid I can believe — but one with enough depth perception for projectile weapons? No way.

Gaining the Glaive involves a lot of mountain-climbing on Colwyn’s part, followed by sticking his hand into red-hot lava (which looks a lot like cherry Kool-Aid mix stirred into K-Y Jelly). The Glaive, it turns out, is a hand-sized five-pointed throwing star with extending blades, and boy, did that cause a lot of trouble for me in following years, when I got into AD&D; there was a weapon in the guidebooks called a “glaive,” which I immediately assumed to be a bladed star. It was only later, when I tried to throw it in combat, that I found out that “glaive” is actually the name of a style of sword. Silly me.

First part of the quest done, the next task is to find the Black Fortress, which unfortunately relocates itself randomly every morning at dawn. (Since it’s always dawn both where the Fortress fades away and fades back, I can only assume that it only relocates along a line running north-south. And I would further guess that all Slayer patrols make it a rule to get back to the Fortress by dawn or get left behind.) For this, Ynyr proposes to take Colwyn to the Blind Emerald Seer to find out a day ahead where the Fortress will be.

Meanwhile, by the way, Lyssa is being held in the Fortress, which looks distinctly different on the inside than its stony and crusty exterior. In fact, the interiors look like, well, they were designed by the same person who did the castle, only with a little more abandon. (Almost, you know, like there was a single set designer or something.) Apparently the Beast has an affinity for symbolic architecture, because there are rooms shaped to look like human eyes or giant clawed hands. (Nothing quite so goofy as the fist-ship in Starcrash, though.) Lyssa is apparently the Beast’s intended. Yup, that’s right — he comes to conquer the world, but he also took the time to abduct the princess, sight unseen, to force her to be his bride. The Beast himself, I should mention, stays pretty much off-screen, his presence indicated by isolated and filter-lensed shots of red lizard eyes, a cruelly-toothed mouth, and spiny hands. (In the later scenes we get to see a little more of him, which shows him to be a fairly respectable man-in-suit, wisely shown still through distorted lenses.) Oddly, though, the Beast doesn’t seem to want to press his suit until Colwyn is dead, which gives Lyssa not much to do throughout the movie except shout, “No! Never!”

Back, then, to the action. Watching Colwyn and Ynyr wander around would be a little boring, so naturally we start adding men to their party. First up is Ergo the Magnificent (David Battley), the comic-relief error-prone magician; then the escaped thief Torquil (Alun Armstrong) and his band of eight rogues (notably featured among them are before-they-were-famous actors Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane). This band goes to see the Emerald Seer (John Welsh in an elegantly coiffed beard) and his servant-boy Titch (Graham McGrath). Unfortunately, the Beast’s power is too strong for the Seer to, well, see, unless he takes a journey to the Emerald Temple, which naturally is in the middle of a swamp.

The Seer shows Colwyn the correct way to polish your big-ass emerald.

Oh, have I mentioned the cyclops? There’s also been this hulking cyclops named Rell (Bernard Bresslaw) with a three-headed spear (not quite a trident) following along to help out in secret. The cyclopses (cyclopsi? whatever) have a history with the Beast, see — he came to their world and offered them the gift of foresight for their other eye. They got cheated so that the only thing they can foresee is the time of their own death, which makes them a pretty morose lot on the whole. Personally, I really felt for Bresslaw, who spent the entire shoot with a big appliance covering his eyes (it blinks! check it out!), but is yet required to run, throw, ride, shake hands, and walk in file with other people; only once in a while do you get a clue that the poor guy couldn’t see a damned thing.

Naturally, the swamp becomes the setting for more Slayer attacks, plus a nasty battle with water covered with floating peat — whoops, I mean quicksand (wink, wink). And in the falderall, the Seer gets himself killed and replaced with a Changeling. The duplicates murderous plan gets stymied, but that still leaves them without the Seer, their only way to find the Fortress. So Ynyr prepares to go to their second choice, the Widow of the Web.

Just in case it isn’t obvious to you, we did just spend a huge chunk of the middle of the movie on what amounted to a detour. Sure, there were battles, and they lost men, but ultimately the entire episode with the Seer feels like just that — an episode. After spending at least twenty minutes on Plan A, they fall back on Plan B.

Granted, Plan B ain’t pretty. There’s this old widow, see, living in the middle of a web in a cave, guarded by a big-ass white stop-motion spider. (When I tried to sell my four-year-old on watching this with me, I told him about the swordfights and the ninja star and all. Nothing. Then I said the magic words, “giant spider,” and he couldn’t turn the tape on fast enough. Every five minutes he said, “Where’s the giant spider?” And then, naturally enough, as soon as the spider showed the first of its eight legs, he hid his face.) He can only get in to see her when she turns her hourglass, stopping the spider. He even gets the information he needs from her, owing to the fact that they two used to be an item waaaay back. But to get back out, she needs to smash the hourglass and pour the sand into his hands — and as the sand runs out, so does his life. (Ooh, how poetic.)

After Krull, the Beast had a moderate career doing the “before” part of Visine commercials.

He manages to tell Colwyn that the Fortress will appear in the Iron Desert before he croaks. Naturally, they’re nowhere near the Iron Desert. But that’s okay — we’ll just make up a convenient new mythological creature to help out! Specifically, it’s “fire mares,” horses that can run fast enough to leave a trail of fire, yet trot slow enough to be easily caught in the wild by a bunch of smelly men. Thus, just before the next day’s dawn, they make it to the Fortress.

Once inside the oddly-organic passageways and stuff, Colwyn finally get to pull out the Glaive. Can I register a complaint? A lot of people have a lot of problems with this movie, but my biggest single whine-and-moan is that the Glaive, the extra-cool throwing star that appears all over the video cover and throughout the opening credits (not to mention the motifs all over the castle and such), disappears for most of the movie. I mean, come on — if you’re going to make such a big deal about the damned throwing star, show me the throwing star! But no — Ynyr warned Colwyn when he brought it down from the mountain not to use it until he needed to, and only in the last ten minutes does it actually hit the air.

And apparently it’s a weapon that takes no skill to use; Colwyn just throws it out and uses his outstretched hand to control its flight, circular-sawing his way into the chamber where Lyssa is held. He then uses it to fight the rear-projection Beast, only to lose it when it kinda gets stuck between the Beast’s ribs. (And no, he’s not packing a backup sword or anything.) He’s weaponless before the Beast –

Until Lyssa opens her hand to give him back the flame that, I guess, she’s been holding this entire time. Huh? What? No, it makes no sense, but nevermind — Colwyn uses it as a flamethrower and BBQs the Beast, whereupon (in time-honored fashion) the entire Fortress starts falling apart.

“We’ve found it — the lost tomb of Antonio Gaudi!”

They rush back through, gather the last few survivors who haven’t been killed by the Beast’s little deathtraps (by name, Torquil, Ergo, and Titch), and make it out just before the mountain crumbles and starts falling upward into the sky. Big kiss, big finale, and everybody gets to start walking a thousand leagues back to where they came from.

As I said, there are plenty of elements here that draw on Star Wars: The evil lord with his generic troops (although the Slayers when killed spit some kind of sluglike creature out of their headpieces, which burrows into the ground — beat that, Imperial stormtroopers!) in a mighty fortress, the princess to be rescued, the mystical weapon, the old man who has to give his life for the mission in an encounter with someone from his past… Those are only the most obvious correspondences.

Thankfully, though, there are enough differences to keep it from being a piece of crap cinema with nothing going for it aside from its Star Warsiness (again, think Starcrash). The production design is creative, if not entirely convincing, and the score is rousing (despite the fact Horner is ripping off his own score for Star Trek 2). And while the pace is a little slow, that gives additional time for a few interesting subplots, such as Ergo and Rell’s friendship, or Ergo’s growing affection for Titch once the Seer is killed. In fact, just about everybody gets some effective character moments except the two leads. Lyssa is little more than the prize waiting at the end of the quest, and Colwyn is unfailingly dashing and faithful and energetic. (In fact, Ken Marshall’s performance here puts me in mind of the hero Beowulf as portrayed in John Gardner’s Grendel — where he is, naturally, quite mad.)

However, given the more recent crop of fantasy movies, it has lots going for it. It isn’t based on a video game, the effects aren’t all computer-generated, there are no anachronistic pop-culture references, and, frankly, Lysette Anthony is getting better-looking to me as I get older. These days, I don’t demand much more from my entertainment.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count (including Slayers): 44
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 4
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Ken Marshall (Colwyn) had a recurring role for several years as Lt. Commander Eddington on DS9
    (James Horner also did the scores for Star Trek 2 and 3, but I don’t think I’m going to count that)