Krull

Peter Yates had the noble but doomed notion of challenging George Lucas at his own game, so this was released in the summer of Return of the Jedi and promptly banished to cable purgatory. The spaceship of interplanetary conquerors wedges itself into the ground and becomes a jagged medieval fortress, the Beast is a scaly behemoth seen through fish-eye lenses, the invading troops are wailing slugs in lumbering armor. The titular planet has two suns and two warring kingdoms, joined in matrimony to defeat the invaders—the Princess (Lysette Anthony) is captured, the Prince (Ken Marshall) is joined by a sage (Freddie Jones) and bandits (Alun Armstrong, Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane) in heroic pursuit. "Yes, each to his fate." Arthurian science-fiction in the footsteps of Boorman (Excalibur), further back perhaps, amid the Eighties hair a sumptuousness in the Zoltan Korda manner. (The luxuriance of hilly landscapes is fused with the massive artifice of Pinewood sound stages.) The Beast's lair amalgamates Gaudí and Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, with a clenched claw that burns into a rose like a vision out of Lang's Der müde Tod. "Love is fleeting. Power is eternal," declares the villain, the maiden argues the opposite as illustrated by one of the minions, a smitten changeling. Oatmeal quicksand in the Great Swamp, flame-hoofed equines in the Iron Desert, the Crystal Spider worthy of Harryhausen. The ashes of time figure rather poetically in the encounter with the Widow of the Web (Francesca Annis), the comic-relief nuisance (David Battley) attains sad dignity in his farewell to the taciturn Cyclops (Bernard Bresslaw): "We had no time." The conscious treatment of British fantasy includes a nod to Baker's Quatermass and the Pit for the fiery finale. With John Welsh, Graham McGrath, Tony Church, and Bernard Archard.