The Return of Torgo and Wooley's September Excite-o-rama!

I feel like Krull, Legend, and there's one other fantasy movie from the era that kind of overlap in my mind of "portagonists going to fight a great evil/the devil in its castle."


There's also some movie I remember seeing as a kid in which there was a band of space rogues (pirates? bounty hunters? adventurers?) that for some reason were trying to protect this kid on their ship, and I seem to recall them getting wild bunched trying to save him in the end. For some reason, talking about Krull and half remembered movies, this vague, unknown movie came to mind.


Legend had some interesting weirdness to it. Mainly Scott's particulate atmospherics giving an even greater dreamlike quality to his fantasy movie. But it also has David Bennent in it as well.

Only things I remember from I Come in Peace is the alien attacking a hot female mechanic and ripping her top open as he….injects something?…..in her boob.


Don’t look at me like that. To 15 year old me that was huge.

I actually started watching this not that long ago but can't remember which movie it is.

Sometimes I go, "maybe Ice Pirates? I literally remember that movie being listed in TV guide in those Saturday afternoon movie listings," but then read the plot synopsis and go, "I don't think it was Ice Pirates..."

Wooley's gotten into the drugs again! We need an intervention!

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And yeah - Krull and Legend are dope. Krull is like a who's who of British actors and Legend has an amazing soundtrack. And Tim Curry is t!ts.

oh this looks like fun! Thanks Torgo and Wooley.

Oh yeah, I Come in Peace (that's what I'll forever call it ) was one I saw at the cinema with that title here in America. I loved it and rented it many times on VHS to show my friends who had the same Sci-Fi/Fantasy love I did/have. I hadn't seen it in years till I caught it this year on Amazon, I believe. Still as much fun as I remembered. And Benben. He was the perfect sidekick with his smartass talk, then his eagerness to help stop the alien. And the last line to the alien is perfect Schwarzenegger-lite.

Legend is great fantasy fun. And yeah, Tim Curry, a long time favorite, steals the show. The visuals rock.

I've been wondering about Split Second for decades now but haven't seen it, as much as I love Rutger Hauer. Gotta find it now!

Great thread!

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Krull.
A fantastic tale of might and magic, of swords and lasers, of wizards and aliens, of people still trying to catch that Star Wars magic without the budget or the work.
Which is not to say it doesn't have its charms, it has many.
But you gotta be pretty forgiving.

This is the story of two rival kingdoms, uniting through the marriage of their respective prince and princess, both extremely good-looking and willful people, to fight the alien scourge that has come to rule their planet.
Lysette Anthony’s Lyssa, a direct spiritual descendent of Princess Leia without enough screen-time to prove it, is exactly the kind of strong woman I always fell for, even when I was a kid. The marriage is her idea, in defiance of her father, because she is the one in her family with the wisdom and courage to do what is necessary. But gets kidnapped by the Stormtroopers, erm, Slayers of Darth Vader, erm, The Beast, in the first ten minutes of the movie. So that the headstrong young hero can come and rescue her along with some fun sidekicks and a wise old mentor... wait a minute...
Ken Marshall's Colwyn is a somewhat less convincing, albeit good-looking in a skinny-legged way, hero when he's crying at the beginning of the movie but builds up some steam as things go along, particularly in a scene where he convinces a band of outlaws to join him and be his "army". He will lead his plucky band on a guerrilla raid of the evil ruler's fortress to rescue Princess Leia, erm, Lyssa... oh, come on!
Look, this movie is still pretty fun but Jesus is it practically like a cover-version of Star Wars with less money, vision, and technique.
Still, I am a generous man, so I enjoy what this movie did do enough to forgive it its (many) shortcomings. The shortcomings are a LOT of terrible blue-screens because they didn't have the budget to build all the fantastic sets they wanted, some other special/makeup effects that just aren't good enough for 1983, a pretty meandering plot that you just sort of go along for the ride on, some pretty spotty dialogue at times, and the general feeling that you have seen this movie before.
The strength is mostly some cool ideas. The whole Widow Of The Web bit is really pretty in concept and could be worse given the budget. The Cyclops who can see the future... but only the future of his own death, the Emerald Seer, the Changelings, Ergo, a sort of magician who can transform into animals, a pretty great group of bandits including Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane (who both get upstaged by a pretty excellent Alun Armstrong as the band's leader), and honestly, whatever the hell The Glaive is it's so cool I don’t really give a shit if the quest to get it is the lamest part of the movie that seems like filler and how Colwyn is able to master its magic immediately doesn't really make a lick of sense.


Ultimately, this is a movie that feels like it gets stuck in the middle between being an actually decent fantasy knock-off of Star Wars and a bad one. Which is a tough place to be. There are some fun parts to watch and some characters that work and by the end are actually pretty fun... but there’s a lot of "oof" in this movie. You really need to know that going in, particularly with regard to the effects, before you get to excited about this one.

I always confuse Krull with Kull the Conqueror. I have seen neither.

Kull The Conqueror is a Kevin Sorbo movie so I assume it's not even watchable (though the stories it's based on are pretty good).
Krull is fun, under-budgeted Star Wars knockoff.
Very different.

I think that my brain has always resisted the knowledge that they are two separate films, and has always defaulted to thinking of them both as the late 90s Kevin Sorbo movie.

I was an unabashed Krull fan as a kid, even had the Atari game, but I haven't seen it since approximately 1986, I'd say. It's been on my "I should watch that again" list forever.

LOL

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Krull is early 80s, which is always better than anything 90s.

Pontchartrain Beach, in its final year, had the Krull arcade game.


I dropped all the quarters and way too much time into it on my final visit to The Beach, much to my grandfather's dismay.

Nice! I'm 100% sure I never played the arcade version

Love Krull, even with its light budget. I remembered Liam Neeson after I saw this movie for the first time and it was when I saw The Dead Pool (1988) that it clicked that it was the same guy from Krull. Only years later did I realize he was also in one of my favorite all-time movies, Excalibur (another 80s classic).
I love movies when a band of good guys team up to face off against evil, and this fit the bill for me. And Lysette Anthony was an eyecatcher for sure---I began to notice her in lots of stuff after this. Ken Marshall was a fine hero and again, years later while I was watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and they had a run of episodes featuring the leader of a covert government group within Starfleet and the leader was played by an actor named Ken Marshall. I thought the name was familiar and sure enough, same actor! But because he had a much-receded hairline by then, I didn't recognize him by sight at the time. Freddie Jones and Francesca Annis (who would both act in the next year's Dune), I thought they were great with their relationship involving the Widow of the Web. And the person who turned into animals. It goes on and on. A very popular movie with me. I'm loving this thread!

Yeah, I don't mind the budget so much as that the movie felt like it got stuck in a weird place between being a lower-budget fantasy film and a big-budget one. It ended up in this weird middle place where it seemed like they were trying to make it look as grand and arch as they could with not enough money to pull it off. A lower-budget film like The Sword And The Sorcerer doesn't have to worry about this but in this film it feels like it has set its mark too high and simply can't hit it with the money they have to spend.
Which, again, is not to say I don't like the movie, lord, I've seen it at least a dozen times. But it suffers some from not being low-budget or big-budget and the space in between being inadequate for the film's aspirations.
I'm actually a Freddie Jones fan from Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed.

No. I think it's another fortress type of thing. I'm also wondering if my brain actually split Legend into two movies in my memory, because in my head there's, "the movie with Tim Curry as basically the devil," and then there's, "the movie with the last unicorns and Tom Cruise and he screwed things up."


And movies I'm pretty sure I wasn't mentally grouping in there either:
Dragonslayer
The Dungeon Master


Though, they do fall under that rubric of 80s fantasy.

ETA: in starting to wonder if "the third movie" is actually a vague almagan in my head taking small parts from movies I do remember.

One movie from that era I'm pretty sure I haven't seen is The Last Unicorn.