Picture this: you’ve watched The Wizard Of Oz every Christmas, and you’re excited about going to the cinema and seeing another light fantasy along the same lines.
Yes, Artax is restored to his equine glory at the end of the movie, but by then, the emotional damage has already been wrought.įun fact: the film’s cinematographer Jost Vacano was also Paul Verhoeven’s cinematographer, and would traumatize us all over again with the startling violence in 1987’s RoboCop. We kids, on the other hand, were left wailing into our Transformers T-shirts. Parents in the audience, who’ve endured years of waking up for work each Monday morning, probably just nodded along to the metaphor. The most upsetting scene in the entire movie, however, is the one where hero Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) loses his horse Artax in the Swamp of Sadness.Ītreyu pleads and tugs at Artax’s bridle, but to no avail: The animal slowly sinks beneath the deep, black ooze.
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A thick streak of melancholy runs through The Neverending Story like a blue vein in cheese, with the movie taking place in world consumed by a deadly force called the Nothing. If you were a youngster not yet versed in the ways of R-rated horror films, the sight of a screaming, melting old man was heart-stopping stuff.Īnother fantasy movie, another disturbing swamp scene.
Topping the list in the Krull nightmare-fuel rankings is the scene captured above, where the Emerald Seer (John Welsh) is replaced by a black-eyed, long-taloned Changeling.
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What director Peter Yates gave us for that money was one of the most eccentric fantasy films of the decade, with disconcerting cinematography from Peter Suschitzky (who’d later go on and make a series of films with David Cronenberg, which figures) and some properly nightmarish images. When you’re a little kid, you don’t really care about how much movies cost, so it came as a surprise, when we got older and started looking into these things, just how much money was spent on Krull: about $47 million, which is even more than Return of the Jedi cost to make.
This wonderfully weird fantasy may not have had the profile of Return of the Jedi, released the same year, but then again, George Lucas’ Star Wars movie didn’t have Bernard Bresslaw as a cyclops, former Grange Hill (and future EastEnders) star Todd Carty as a bandit, or that cool, boomerang-like weapon, the Glaive.
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