The Lowdown on Conan Movies


Last week, I was surprised to see that the 2011 version of Conan the Barbarian had been delivered to my mailbox thanks to Blockbuster.  Apparently, I had added it to my queue and forgotten to delete it when the reviews were atrocious.  It was nowhere near the top of my queue, but sometimes Blockbuster will go pretty deep down the list.  This was one of those times.
Part of the appeal of the Blockbuster program is that it offers the option of in-store exchanges.  I have a Blockbuster store 5 minutes from my house.  I considered just exchanging Conan unwatched for a movie I actually wanted to see.  But I have a blog to maintain.  I figured I might as well go ahead and watch the damn thing and write about.

 So, here I am making lemonade out of lemons.  Originally, I planned to write up a straight-forward review of the new Conan.  But I quickly realized that my review was going to draw a lot of comparisons to the previous Conan films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.  So I figured, what the hell?  Why not write about them all.

The 1982 version of Conan the Barbarian has taken on the status of a cult classic.  I admit, I remember it with some nostalgia.  But when it was released, the critics were polarized.  Many were put off by the film’s over the top violence and its attitude towards women.  Conan has an infamous speech (one of his few lines of dialogue) in which he talks about the joys of hearing “the lamentation” of his enemies’ women after he has crushed them.  It’s not a touchy-feely movie.
The driving creative force behind the original Conan movie was John Milius.  Milius has a reputation in Hollywood for two things.  One, he’s immensely talented.  Two, he is what many would describe as a right-wing kook.  Conan the Barbarian perfectly reflects both of those traits.
Conan the Barbarian is a crazy ass movie.  James Earl Jones plays a cult leader who eventually turns into a snake.  No explanation is given.  But if you get caught up in the spirit of the movie, no explanation is needed either.  Milius has created such an engaging world that you just accept his crazy snake cult no questions asked.
Conan was Schwarzenegger’s big break in Hollywood.  Milius wisely limits Arnold’s dialogue.  As an actor, Arnold makes a very believable Austrian body builder.  Despite looking like a barbarian, he is barely believeable any time he is asked to deliver a line, change facial expressions or breathe in and out.  He does wield a pretty mean sword though.
The genius of Milius’ Conan is that it plays to Schwarzenegger’s strengths.  There is barely any dialogue in the entire movie.  Most of the lead roles are played by athletes rather than actors.  They were cast for their athleticism.  So Milius just gets right to it and lets them do their stuff.  Rather than dialogue, Milius filled the soundtrack with a bombastic score.

Despite pissing off a lot of critics, Conan the Barbarian was a big enough hit to warrant a sequel.  In 1984, Schwarzenegger returned to the role in Conan the Destroyer.  Milius wasn’t available to direct the sequel, so Conan the Destroyer serves to illustrate just how much Milius contributed to the success of the original film.  Because, it’s terrible.
The plot is positively ridiculous even by Conan standards.  An evil queen (plays by Superman 2’s Sarah Douglas) needs an escort for her niece on a special mission.  The princess has some kind of destiny, blah blah blah.  The main plot point is that Douglas wants to sacrifice the princess once her task is complete.
For the scrifice to work, the princess must remain a virgin.  This plot point is central to Conan the Destroyer.  For a PG movie, there is an amazing amount of attention given to Olivia D’Abo’s virginity (and also her cleavage). 
So who does Ursa (I’m sorry, the queen) hire to protect the princess’ virginity?  Arnold Schwarzenegger and Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain.  Despite all the fantasy elements and low budget effects, the hardest thing to believe in Conan the Destroyer is that the princess wasn’t deflowered during the opening credits.
Yeah, Conan the Destroyer is terrible.  But it’s terrible in a really fun way.  It’s the kind of movie where the nubile princess is carried off by a fantasy creature which would barely pass muster on a Saturday morning cartoon.  And Conan fights a guy in an ape mask who is clearly just a guy in an ape mask.

Yeah, that guy.  The special effects came from some guy running out to Halloween Express for an ape mask, teeth and a red cloak.  Oh, and Grace Jones is in it too.
Unfortunately, no one told the makers of Conan the Destroyer that Schwarzenegger should be given as little dialogue as possible.  He had improved a great deal during his two years in Hollywood.  But he’s still a big slab of no talent.  Conan the Destroyer gives Schwarzenegger enough dialogue to illustrate that point.
Believe it or not, Conan the Destroyer did well enough internationally to warrant a sequel.  But by then, Schwarzenegger had made Predator and his contract with producer Dino De Laurentiis had expired.  Instead, the script for Conan the Conqueror got recycled into Kull the Conqueror.  Waste not, want not I guess.
The Conan franchise kicked about in Hollywood for a couple of decades.  At one point, it looked like The Rock might pick up the sword as a son of Conan.  Possibly with Schwarzenegger returning for a cameo.  But Dwayne Johnson made the Scorpion King instead and then wisely decided to leave the sword and sorcery genre behind him.

But in Hollywood today, no successful movie franchise goes dormant indefinitely.  After numerous false starts, 2011 saw the release of a new Conan the Barbarian.  The new Conan, Jason Mamoa (who cut his chops on Baywatch Hawaii naturally) was so confident of the movie’s success that he began pitching sequel ideas before the movie was even released.
Instead, the new Conan opened to horrendous reviews and bombed at the box office.  So, I guess Mamoa’s sequel drafts can go back on the shelf.
When I put the disc in my Bluray player, the question on my mind was this: Could the new Conan possibly be as bad as the critics say?  Could it be worse than Conan the Destroyer?
As it turns out, the answer to both of those questions is “no”.  The new Conan the Barbarian is not a good movie.  But it’s not nearly so incompetent (or unintentionally hysterical) as Conan the Destroyer.  It’s just incompetent enough to be boring.
The movie starts of with a shot of Conan in the womb.  I shit you not.  Morgan Freeman drones on and on about some mask during the opening narration.  And just when it sounds like Freeman is about to fall asleep, he says something about Conan being born to battle.  And then the movie illustrates exactly what that phrase means.
We are treated to a womb-view shot as a sword pierces Conan’s mother.  The blade nearly misses the unborn barbarian.  Conan’s dad, Ron Perlman, runs to his fallen wife’s side.  Her last request is to see her baby before she dies.  Perlman then reaches into her wound and pulls the bloody baby out to show her as she dies on the battlefield.
At this point, my mind was racing.  There’s an old addage in storytelling that you should show the audience rather than telling them.  But in this case, I think I’d have been okay without being shown.  I was also thinking, this movie might just be crazier than the original.
Sadly, it’s all downhill from Conan’s birth.  The movie then goes into an extended sequence showing Conan being raised by his single dad.  Perlman is hard on his son.  Desperate to prove himself to his dad, young Conan beheads a bunch of people in the woods.  It’s kind of like the Smallville sequence in Superman the Movie only with less Americana and a lot more beheading.
I know.  Sounds pretty awesome, right?  Well, the crazy factor keeps dropping.  Sure, Stephen Lang shows up with a creepy witch daughter with a Freddy Kruger glove and proceeds to kill Conan’s village.  And sure, that massacre ends with Ron Perlman pouring molten metal all over his face to save his son, but once Mamoa shows up all that crazy gives way to the laziest of fantasy tropes.
Now, let me get this out of the way up front.  Mamoa is fine as Conan.  He’s got more dialogue in this movie than Schwarzenegger had in his first five films combined.  He’s charming.  He can act well enough.  And he can even speak English which was not a requirement the first time around.  So, he’s got that going for him.
The problem is that the movie isn’t very good.  But it also lacks the crazy that made the first two films so watchable.  Sure, they put a fair amount of blood and boobs on the screen.  But it feels like someone is just checking off items on a list.  Like they calculated in advance exactly how much blood and boobs they would need to show in order to qualify as a barbarian movie without getting slapped with an NC-17 rating.
There’s a scene early in the movie where Conan frees a bunch of slaves.  They are of course topless models.  Once Conan announces their freedom, they ask what he expects them to do next.  He puts an arm around one of the models and walks her off screen to what I can only assume was the barbarian equivalent of a frat house party. 
Compare that with the nutso orgy scene from Milius’ Conan the Barbarian and you have a pretty good idea of why the new Conan fails.
The bad guys are played by Avatar’s Stephen Lang and Rose McGowan.  They chew scenery non-stop.  But the movie leaves them stranded.  Lang’s plan centers around recreating that mask that Morgan Freeman talked about during the opening narration.  After decades of trying, Lang finally succeeds in his quest. 
In the final scenes, he puts on the mask.  Instead of becoming a god as Lang had intended, the mask just makes him look really stupid when Conan kicks his ass.
The new Conan is the kind of movie that just assumes everyone in the audience is an idiot.  A lot of time is spent early on showing Conan and his dad forge a sword.  The scene ends with Perlman telling his son that one day he will wield the sword.
Towards the end of the movie, the sword appears again.  And characters start talking about the fact that it was forged by Conan’s father for no reason other than to remind audiences of this fact.  It comes up again and again.  Finally, when Conan holds the sword as an adult, we get a flashback to him and his dad forging the damn sword.
The effects in the 80s Conan look pretty cheesy today.  But I’ll take them over the piss poor CGI in the new Conan the Barbarian.  I’m not one of those anti-CG people who complains every time computer effects are used.  But at this point, audiences have seen a lot of CG effects.  The bad ones really stand out. 

I’ll take the stuntman in a monkey mask from Conan the Destoryer over these cheesy sand ninjas from the new Conan movie any day.
At the end of the day, Conan the Barbarian wasn’t as bad as I’d heard it was.  But I kind of wished it was.  If it had been worse, it might have been more entertaining.  As it was, I found my mind wandering.  I watched Conan while folding laundry and I found the movie only slightly more engaging than my household chores.
More Lowdown
Le Blog

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
daffystardust
Editor
12 years ago

Negative reviews are fun to write AND fun to read! It is the main reasson to be glad that bad movies exist. Thanks, Conan! Are you familiar with the extent of Wilt Chamberlain’s maiden-deflowering? In his autobiography he claimed to have bedded 20,000 women. At an NBA league event, legendary sports writer Dick Schapp but his arms around a referee and Wilt for a photo and said, “Look everybody! Between us, we’ve slept with twenty thousand and twenty women!” Everyone had a good laugh. A minute or so later, the referee came to Schapp and admitted that his wife had… Read more »

Fozbaca
Fozbaca
12 years ago

+1
It was such a disappointing movie. My hope was for a really good bad or a real movie.

Geo
Geo
12 years ago

Thanks LeBeau, you just saved me another $1.

Andymovieman
Andymovieman
12 years ago

i like the original conan the than the new conan.

Andymovieman
Andymovieman
12 years ago

there are 8 reasons why the original conan was better than the new one. 1. the direction of john milius. 2. the music of the late basil poledouris (RIP) 3. the script from milius and oliver stone 4. arnold schwarzenegger as conan 5. james earl jones as evil thulsa doom 6. sandahl bergman as valeria, conan’s love interest. 7. the late mako as the wizard akiro. 8. surfer gerry lopez as subotai, conan’s sidekick.

Geo
Geo
12 years ago
Reply to  Andymovieman

Movieman nails it! Best list I’ve seen about this subject. Ok, it’s the only list, but it includes everything that I liked about the original, and makes me even more certain that I’ll never watch the Momoa version.

Geo
Geo
12 years ago
Reply to  Geo

Yes, I just wish that Marvel understood the concept of 5-10 years before reboot.

Geo
Geo
12 years ago
Reply to  Geo

Yeah, I know, but Marvel is very involved the contracts that setup situations where studios have to rush out films in order to retain the rights. And no matter what the story is behind each reboot, Marvel’s name is constantly coming up as a reboot whore.

Andymovieman
Andymovieman
12 years ago

need i say more?

Geo
Geo
12 years ago

Just to save everyone the cost of another rental, I recommend that you do not rent the new horror film, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. Guillermo Del Toro’s name is all over it, but he’s not the director. Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes star. I won’t summarize because you can read a summary anywhere online. This is a remake of a semi-classic 70’s tv movie, that I remember fondly. The differences between the two: ORIGINAL Low production values TV actors No big producer/writer Genuinely creepy Makes you say “That was really good for a tv movie” REMAKE High production… Read more »

Geo
Geo
12 years ago
Reply to  lebeau

I agree, and in this case he also co-wrote it.

daffystardust
Editor
12 years ago

Del Toro was supposed to produce a reboot of The Haunted Mansion for Disney, but that looks to be up in the air at this point. I hope if it does come to fruition that Del Toro takes more care with it. He has produced some good films in the past.

Geo
Geo
12 years ago
Reply to  daffystardust

Yeah, I’m a fan of his work too, which is why I snagged it. I realized when I rented it that he wasn’t the director, but I just expected a hech of a lot more than this. This was genuine disappointment vs watching something like the Conan reboot where you know going in to expect massive fail 🙂

Andymovieman
Andymovieman
12 years ago

i only plan to see good movies that are underrated and that aren’t remakes. i wouldn’t pay money to see the remake of robocop, total recall, as well as a sequel to mad max witthout mel gibson and i wouldn’t see a remake of escape from new york. that’s what i think. once an actor makes a movie famous there is no point in remaking this. all i can say is that it is all about money when it comes to remakes.

andymovieman
andymovieman
11 years ago

screw hollywood remakes and reboots. originals are better.

daffystardust
Editor
11 years ago
Reply to  lebeau

3 remakes that were better than the original:
– “The Thing” (1982) with Kurt Russell is superior to its rather good B&W forbearer from the 1950s.
– “Little Shop of Horrors” (1986) is a musical version of the Roger Corman B film and bests it despite Jack Nicholson being in the original
– “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (1988) is an improvement on “Bedtime Story” with Marlon Brando and David Niven.

daffystardust
Editor
11 years ago
Reply to  lebeau

I haven’t seen the original “True Grit” either, so I didn’t feel like I could include it. “Ocean’s Eleven” was decent fun, but not as good as the 3 I listed, and I didn’t have a 5th one to include off the top of my head, so I decided to leave it at 3.

daffystardust
Editor
11 years ago
Reply to  andymovieman

I generally agree that originals are usually better than remakes. For example, Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” was much better than Mel Gibson’s.

cinemarchaeologist
11 years ago
Reply to  daffystardust

Ha! No need to brace for it–I don’t think he has any fans anymore.

cinemarchaeologist
11 years ago
Reply to  daffystardust

Yeah, the tapes are monstrous, and I won’t look at anything he does anymore because of it. I have a rather violent loathing for people who behave that way with women, and this is particularly true with a creature like Gibson, who should have been on his knees every day thanking his anti-Semitic god that Oksana Grigorieva ever even looked his way. I joke about his lack of fans, but he is a black-hearted villain, and it would never do for him to come within my reach.

andymovieman
andymovieman
11 years ago

that’s just because he’s going through a midlife crisis and people criticized passion of the christ and his unusual behavior.

andymovieman
andymovieman
11 years ago

you know something when i see people judge mel gibson, or clint eastwood, or even john milius i think people are hypocrites. there are talented people who aren’t liberal who make great movies and who care about the movies and their fans and believe in the american spirit a lot better than the hollywood lefties i see that care more about kissing ass with politicans and dictators than caring about their fans and making a great movie. like i think sean penn has done some good movies but really he thinks chavez is not a dictator. sean penn should get… Read more »

anonymous
anonymous
11 years ago

ok then. i just wanted to say what i needed to say on certain people that are talented

Terrence Clay (@TMC1982)

The CineFiles – Swords, Sorcery & Skin!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym_kQSEUBGE&list=PLz2k-4HgoLk5OK9W9SSsqoZYCE2VYiqdu
STEEL! CROM! SLEAZE! Ah, the Conan rip offs of the ’80s. The boys discuss CONAN THE BARBARIAN, THE SWORD & THE SORCERER, DEATHSTALKER, BARBARIAN QUEEN and BEASTMASTER.

Terrence Clay (@TMC1982)

The 15 Worst Remakes Of Classic 80s Movies http://screenrant.com/worst-remakes-80s-movies/?view=all Conan the Barbarian Crude, witless and sophomoric, this remade version of Conan the Barbarian is about as sloppy and unimaginative as remakes can get. The unofficial king of directing terrible remakes, director Marcus Nispel, who also helmed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot, brings out his big guns to transform Conan the Barbarian into Conan the Boring. All of the humor or light jabs that were present in the original production had since been slain here. Nispel’s production is just another movie that forgets it’s a movie, taking itself way too seriously… Read more »

0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x