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So instead, Corwyn assembles a rag-tag group of thieves, some muscle, a guy with a bow and one eccentric wizard for comic relief. They form a travelling party where each man has specialized skills that are useful in just one specific situation, after which they will surely die. And, Corwyn has a Glaive of Charisma +1.

Together, they set off to find The Beast, rescue the princess, blah blah blah. I’m sure you know what I’m about to say, but to call Krull “derivative” isn’t really even fair. Let’s call it “shameless” instead.

How do movies like this come to be? Some suit sticks his finger in the wind, samples what the kids like “nowadays” and greenlights two hours of lavish, dispirited eye candy in response. It’s like serving up a half baked blob of batter covered with the best frosting ever and calling it a birthday cake. Krull is tasty on the outside and nothing but grainy, lukewarm mush underneath. It’s not half as watchable as Star Wars and it lacks the spontaneous originality of D&D. On the upside it is relatively well paced (unlike everything Tolkien ever wrote), has a really cool title and packs enough genuinely intriguing visual appeal to distract you from the bad dialogue. The sadness is that with just a little bit more effort, this could have been a very decent movie. It’s not that Krull is mind-bendingly awful or anything. It’s just frustrating; like an unambitious 13-year-old who excels at getting ahead in life without trying.

Everything is derivative - you’ll never find a story whose themes are entirely those of the person who wrote it. But Krull is a hard core offender that doesn’t just wear its influences on its sleeve - it openly mimics them. It’s a dyed in the wool genre picture with such a distinctly campy feel that it might have worked better as a comedy. Still, it runs through its paces with zest and efficiency. Its visual effects are pretty solid - for the time. And it’s almost pointless to fault a film for being uninventive when there’s never any real attempt to hide it. besides, aren’t most classic Kung Fu pictures pretty formulaic? But if you like them, you watch them precisely because you like the formula, and your level of enjoyment depends entirely on the quality of execution.

I’d say that Krull executes well enough for a single viewing. It is barely clever enough to entertain teens, silly enough to delight smaller kids and not quite too stupid to make adults regret watching, provided they have a sense of humor. But whether you love it, hate it, or anything in between, I doubt you’ll feel inclined to watch it more than once. I have, and it makes you feel any better, I didn’t really suffer. Much.

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