I attended a screening of Peter Yates, 1983 fantasy film "Krull" last year (2024) at The Cinema Museum, (a venue well worth checking out if you like to see a diverse collection of cinema
paraphernalia such as old cinema projectors), a film that I'd seen for the first time on it's initial release in 1983 in the unlikely setting of a cinema in Chennai (then Madras) India and my abiding memory is the reaction of the mostly young male audience when witnessing the occasionally gruesome visual effects, which was riotous laughter. The early 80's was the period of "body horror" sci-fi, eg John Carpenter's "The Thing" or Ridley Scott's "Alien" that had yet to penetrate the Indian market due to censorship and therefore the gruesome sight of alien slugs exiting the bodies of the "Krull" villain's shock-troops as they died must have been something audiences in India had never seen before and this manifested, oddly, as laughter - either that or they found the whole premise of the film absurd.
The plot enjoys a superficially novel premise that references the fairy tale aspect of the hugely successful "Star Wars" that preceded it and no doubt inspired it's production, from the asteroid approaching the planet Krull of the title that opens the film before landing to become a mountain that is the fortress stronghold of a grotesque alien ruler who commands his troops to kidnap a suitable woman for his bride and enslave the peace-loving planet's inhabitants before moving on to conquer other worlds.
The object of the alien ruler's desire is a princess (Lisette Anthony) and a young nobleman (Ken Marshall) is tasked with rescuing her, gathering up a team of supporters who individually possess particular valuable skills before locating a magical weapon, the "Glaive", a kind of star-shaped boomerang with blades, that is the only weapon capable of defeating the monstrous alien invader.
In short the film draws on many archetypal folk tale tropes to weave a story that is a backdrop to various visual effects set pieces such as a giant stop-motion crystalline spider, magical transformations of people into animals and Star Wars style weaponry.
I knew in advance that the working title of the film had been "The Dragons of Krull" and this hints at the folk tale ambitions of the script but there are no "dragons" as such in the final film, unless you consider the monstrous fire-breathing humanoid alien to be a kind of reptilian life-form, and after several prior screenings I was left scratching my head over what is nonetheless an enjoyable oddity it's clearer to me now that it owes a great deal to, for example, the Teutonic and European epics and folk tales such as "Siegfried" but with a science fiction spin, reinterpreting older mythologies for a contemporary audience, in the much the same way as "Star Wars", in the form of what we would recognise to be some kind of technology instead of "magic", though there are also magical elements in "Krull".
Placing the location of the story in another universe echoes the premise of "Star Wars" and it has many elements in common with George Lucas' creation but it treads its own quirky path of being something more akin to the mythologies and folk tales of Europe and S.East Asia by being part fairy tale, part science fiction fantasy and part swashbuckling adventure.
This reinterpretation for contemporary audiences is not a new thing though it's unusual for a film from the West and may have in turn inspired Kon Ichikawa's 1987 film "Princess From The Moon" that does much the same thing by reinterpreting a popular Japanese folk tale and adding science-fiction elements.
The film performed poorly on its initial release but has since gained a cult following, mostly from those who were entranced by the film as youngsters and from the creative artistry point of view drew on the talents of leading British visual effects and scenic designers such as Derek Meddings and Brian Johnson - the bizarre interior of the alien's "Black Fortress" in particular is a stand-out feature of the film and adds immensely to its originality.
"Krull", Dir: Peter Yates, 1983
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