Fresh and Exciting

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Well, I thought you'd have to motor in order to come up with anything cheesier than Arnie's 3 sword and sorcery outings (2 Conans and a Red Sonja), but Kevin Sorbo's Kull the Conqueror manages to do so with a minimum of trouble.To be fair, the sets and costumes are OK, and the cast give it their all. But the special effects are a bit naff, and the special effects make-up is super-naff.And the script, plot, and characterisations are not only naff, but also cheesy (and when I say cheesy, I'm talking Gorgonzola).It passes the time if you're not feeling fussy.

Back in the 1990s, there was a syndicated TV show called "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys". It starred Kevin Sorbo as the demi-god and followed the light hearted adventures of the son of Zeus as he and various companions wandered through the world of ancient myth, punching evil in the face. The shows blend of action, humor and moral earnestness was so popular it spawned a companion series called "Xena: Warrior Princess". Unfortunately, it also shaped this sub-mediocre entry into the sword-n-sorcery genre.Kull is another creation of Robert E. Howard, the mind behind Conan the Barbarian. Kull is also a barbarian, but one who lands on the throne of the kingdom of Valusia. In Howard's short stories, Kull must defend his land from external enemies and his crown from treasonous nobles. This movie has only the barest of those details in common with Howard's writing, and I'm not sure why they bothered. Kull the Conqueror has very little to do with the spirit or substance of Robert E. Howard. It's basically a more generic and inferior version of Conan the Destroyer, which was itself a huge step down from the original Conan the Barbarian.The first half of the film deals with Kull's (Kevin Sorbo) ascension to the throne and the plotting nobles led by General Taligaro (Thomas Ian Griffith). Kull meets a beautiful fortune teller (Katrina Lombard) and the nobles enlist the help of a wizard (Edward Tudor-Pole) to resurrect an ancient demon queen (Tia Carrera). His enemies seemingly kill Kull, but then he turns up fine and teams up with the fortune teller and her priestly brother (Litefoot) as the story becomes the exact same sort of quest we've seen a jillion times before in these films.The first thing to know about Kull the Conqueror is that is has a cringingly bad hair metal soundtrack. The overblown guitar riffs here make the soundtrack of Ladyhawke seem like the greatest music ever made. The second thing to know about this movie is that all the action and comedy are virtually identical in tone to "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys", except dumber and without much of a moral center. That vacuousness joins hands with a grating sense of modernity in everything the characters do and say to create a doubly anachronistic feeling. This thing comes off like a lame 80s action movie playing dress up. The third thing to know is that Sorbo gives the best performance by far with an indifferent version of the same exact stuff he did as Hercules.All I can say about Kull the Conqueror is that it won't make your eyes bleed. There's nothing here that could even be charitably described as "good", but you won't feel like you completely wasted your time if you watch it.

Some films are mediocre, some films are bad, but still other films are so misconceived and poorly executed that the film-makers should be embarrassed of themselves. "Kull" is exactly that film, and it's more fun to laugh at its unintentional idiocy than to make any attempt to take it seriously as fantasy. At any rate the film-makers also took care of that possibility by filling the sorry affair with so much contemporary humor in a pathetic attempt to imitate the formula of the "Hercules" TV show that starred the same "actor" who appears in this film, Kevin Sorbo.It didn't have to be this way. King Kull is one of the more interesting characters created by the legendary 1930s pulp writer Robert E. Howard, famous for Conan. Howard's writing has been mostly insulted and degraded by these film versions -- but this one is so awful it makes "Conan the Destroyer" look like "Lord of the Rings." It makes "Red Sonja" look like "Jason and the Argonauts." And it makes "Conan the Barbarian" look like "Citizen Kane." I actually paid to see this in the theater because I'm such a big Robert Howard fan. It was so disappointing that I had to give it a spin on DVD just to see if it could really be as bad as I remembered it. It's far worse than any memory can convey. Right away, you have probably the worst music I've ever heard in a film, a combination of mock-Wagner and mock-Megadeth. Electric guitars on the soundtrack are an especially poor harbinger for a film supposedly set in ancient history. Then you start to notice that all the characters look like roadies for Spinal Tap, and the main villain dude has a mullet that would make Billy Ray Cyrus jealous. So maybe it all makes sense in a twisted way... apparently this was a demographic they were shooting for; perhaps they even advertised this film on WWF smack-down.There's no getting around what limits the movie the most -- basically the entire cast is wrong and incompetent. Kevin Sorbo always seems like a nice guy, and little else. He's all wrong to play a sadistic barbarian, but the film-makers have solved that problem by removing all traces of Kull's personality and all signs that he was created by Robert Howard, or you could say all signs that he was created by anyone other than a market research survey group. He's polite, soft-spoken, respectful of women, and he wants to free all the slaves. He's a hero -- a character who has no business in a Robert Howard story. Just once I'd like to see this great writer's stories rendered in a way that isn't just to turn all the characters into generic knights in shining armor. Doing that to his world and his characters is like making a Disney movie about the Donner Party. I can understand why a lot of people look down on writing like his, because they assume it's actually junk like this movie.It doesn't stop there, but I get too tired of thinking about it to go on. Sorbo is the least of our worries in the cast actually, considering that Harvey Fierstein is painfully hammy (and his character seems modeled on a dull character from the TV show), and the director seems to have thought it was a good idea to give all the heavy acting scenes to Tia Carrere. Her misbegotten performance lends the movie most of its laugh factor. This movie is cheap and ugly looking -- I would guess that they spent more money on the lame "Merlin" miniseries in the 90s than they did on this movie which was foisted on theater audiences. Not only that, but the director has no taste and no talent for cinema at all. Everything is shot in a bland and generic way so that none of it seems infused with any kind of power or majesty. Whatever the faults of Milius' original Conan film, and there are many, at the very least he attempted to get the dark atmosphere of Howard's world right and to convey some fraction of the characters' fatalism. Unless the new "Solomon Kane" film is a huge surprise, it will be the only example of somebody even attempting something different of this type in a fantasy movie for a long time.

Rock music. Fantasy realm. Cool battle scenes. Okay, not the most perfect movie in the world, but still a good movie. Kevin Sorbo plays Kull a barbarian from Atlantis. Wishing to join General Taligaro's Dragon Legion, he is rejected at first for not being "noble blood". When the King decides to slaughter his entire family, so his life is not endangered later on when they challenge the throne. Kull (Sorbo) is kills the King and takes his place, as is the law. When the threat of an evil demon queen comes knocking, Kull takes one last adventure to destroy the queen who is trying to take his kingdom, while also falling in love along the way.Kull the Conqueror was actually meant to be Conan 3 (Conan the Conqueror, and was based on the first Conan story "The Phoenix on the sword"), but due to Arnie not wanting to reprise his role and Kevin not wanting to redo a character already played. (Note however that a Kull story entitled "By This Axe I Rule" is very similar to the story line of this movie, and is a more likely basis for the movie.)After all is said and done though, this fantasy movie mixed with a great soundtrack of heavy rock music, we have a superb movie made to entertain us on a rainy day. 2/2 for the actors' roles. 2/2 for the excellent scenery. 4/4 for the storyline. 2/2 for the production, directing, script and overall areas of the movie.