Previously I interviewed KULL screenwriter Chuck Pogue and
presented overviews of two of his screenplays and of one of the
Don Mancini rewrites. As bland and watered down as the Don Mancini
rewrite was, the final shooting script for the film is even worse,
with one lonely exception. The only problem is that you must sit
through the entire movie to get to the one good scene.
Just as in the Mancini rewrite I reviewed, the wizard Enaros
does not appear until after Kull becomes king. We see that he is
deformed from a fire, but no explanation is given. By doing this
King Borna's sudden attack on his heirs has no context. In the
Pogue version, Enaros had promised to make Borna immortal after he
revived the Red Witch of Acheron, but Borna jumps the gun and
kills his heirs in anticipation of his forthcoming immortality. In
the film the murders happen for no apparent reason. I guess we're
to assume that the king just snapped, what with his hard life
being ruler of all he surveys. It's poorly thought out. We're also
never told how many people he's killed as we only see a long shot
of one body on the throne room floor.
The pure Mancini scene when Tu (wretchedly miscast, and now a
eunuch to boot), tells Kull that he can't free the slaves is as I
described it. When Kull meekly complies he starts becoming Kull
the dull. Also, when the Red Witch is revived she's inexplicably
introduced as Tu's niece, rather than Ducalon's, even though Tu's
not a part of the conspiracy! We're apparently not supposed to
notice, or else forget this later on. More bad writing and bad
directing.
The resurrection of Akivasha is interesting, but the scenes
around it are not. The performances and writing are listless as
Mancini has bled all of the life and motivation out of the
characters. It isn't any help that the directing and
cinematography are uniformly mediocre, like a low budget made for
video movie.
Eliminating the character of Rolondo and combining him with
Ascalante is a sure sign of a low budget movie as it was clearly
done to eliminate an actor they'd have to pay.
The unfortunate scene where Taligaro is arguing with Akivasha,
and he complains that this wasn't their pact and she replies:
"I've altered our pact. Pray I don't alter it further,"
remains intact in spite of the fact that this is a line Darth
Vader used in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. Mancini's rewrite is so
flat and uninteresting that he has to try to prop it up by
stealing a line from another movie! This is something I noticed
and brought to the attention of Chuck Pogue, but in the
CINEFANTASTIQUE version of my interview the editor altered the
piece to put this observation in Chuck Pogue's mouth. This
apparently has angered Don Mancini as he's openly complained that,
"This is called an homage and Chuck Pogue knows that
perfectly well. He's just whining!"
Can we finally retire the term homage and end that
insulting and unimaginative practice? Why is it that when someone
does an homage, it's in a script in which none of the other
lines the writer penned are half as interesting as the one he
"borrowed"? Chuck Pogue's line from THE FLY ("Be
afraid. Be very afraid.") was a casual throwaway line which
has been "borrowed" so many times in so many places by
so many people (the latest being the tag line on the new MR. BEAN
movie poster) that only "I don't think we're in Kansas any
more" and "I have a bad feeling about this" are
ahead of it in line for being "borrowed." If Don Mancini
was any kind of writer he'd come up with his own clever lines and
not lift them from other films.
In Chuck Pogue's script a shark menaced Zareta and Juba when
they're thrown overboard. In Don Mancini's script it's a sea
monster. In the actual film it's. . . nothing! Actually, the head
of the sea monster was apparently built because we see it hanging
in a net on the ship, but we never see how it got there (bad
directing and bad editing). In one brief scene they cut the head
open and a lot of fish spill out. Apparently the sea monster head
failed to function as planned and so the scene was cut, but the
head was still used, although to little effect as it is only
briefly glimpsed (because it looks so unconvincing? I don't know).
Without the shark or the sea monster, the sequence of the mutiny
winds up ending on a rather flat note. The fight scenes throughout
the film are poorly directed, poorly edited, and turn out boring.
No drama at all. And the guitar music during the fights is wildly
inappropriate. That this was ultimately deemed a kids movie is
perhaps evidenced by the fact that the celebrity premiere of the
film was held on a Saturday afternoon at Universal Studios, just
as the premier of FLIPPER was in the Summer of '96.
The lovemaking scene when Akivasha quietly intrudes on Kull and
Zareta has been toned down to a silly scene in which Kull briefly
imagines that he sees Akivasha's face instead of Zareta's. No
imagination in the directing here at all.
The Isle of Ever-Night has been inexplicably changed to the
Isle of Ice, just to dumb it down, I guess.
When Kull escapes from the ice cave we are not shown how Kull
retrieves a ship from the ice to escape the island. In the Pogue
drafts there was such a scene. Was it cut for budgetary reasons?
We're left wondering how Kull found a ship and, by himself alone,
freed it from the ice floes and escaped.
The climax is perfunctory, by the numbers and boring. How can
fight scenes be filmed to be boring? Ask the director. Kevin Sorbo
may have worked out to get his body in shape for the camera, but
he doesn't do much flexing of his acting muscles. I've seen him do
much better work on HERCULES.
By the time end ending was filmed, it had been altered so that
Kull swings his ax, destroys the stone tablet of laws and
declares, "By this axe I rule!" This is a Don Mancini
scene, and the only good one he added to the script. The only
problem is it should have been much earlier in the script in order
to establish Kull's personality more as he essentially has no
personality in this film. He's just a cipher, as are the other
characters. Like the two 1980s Conan films, KULL THE CONQUEROR is
ultimately a bad pastiche which fails to understand the source
material enough to adapt it and avoid the stupid cliché's. The
result is a big, forgettable dud, which like the two Conan films
before it, does nothing to show people why Robert E. Howard's work
should be admired by anyone, much less inspire them to seek it
out.
NOTE: The credits list L. Sprague de Camp as a technical
advisor, so he managed to make money off the film after all.
Initially de Camp praised the original Conan version of the
script, but attacked the revised script when the names were
changed to make it a Kull script. De Camp only makes money off
Conan merchandising, not Kull (ordinarily).
The novelization of KULL by Sean Moore has become quite scarce
as it was published crediting the screenplay to Chuck Pogue and
Don Mancini. Pogue received sole screen credit from the Writer's
Guild since the rewrites merely screwed up what Chuck wrote
without being substantially new material. Putting Mancini's name
in the book violated the Guild contract and the paperback was
withdrawn from circulation. I'll be surprised if they bother to
fix it and reissue it. An instant collector's item!
KULL opened on the Labor Day weekend. The box office results
were announced on Tuesday September 2nd and KULL landed in 9th
place - dead on arrival! That means it will already have fallen out
of the top ten by the time its second weekend of release limps
along. When a new film opens in fourth or fifth place that's
considered disappointing. Ninth place means that Kevin Sorbo's
film career has just taken a giant step backwards. Don Mancini's
film career has leaped into writing the fourth CHILD'S PLAY film.
What an accomplishment!
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