Conan the Destroyer
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Movie Reviews of Conan the Destroyer
Movie Review: A must have movie!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
this was an fun fantasy-action movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a powerful kick ass/warrior. Arnold is so damm sexy with all the muscle showing sword-fighting ....And yes, the movie is visually interesting, too, even though, the special effects are obsolete and a little goofy...but thats ok...its an old movie now... A movie I love seeing over and over again...a movie that is a must have for any Arnold -Fan!Movie Review: Awful movie. I wish I could forget it
Summary: 1 Stars
In the first movie, magic was just that. Magic. It was dangerous, expensive in terms of life, and used only in dire circumstances. In this movie magic is reduced to the level of a poor "Dungeons and Dragons" game. I halfway expected The wizard (Mako) to pull out some oddly shaped dice and roll them in his battle with the Man Ape/Toth-Amon.
In the original movie, Conan ponders The riddle of steel, he's a man of action, but still a thinker. He speaks little. In this movie, talks too much.
Conan rescues a blonde girl and is betrayed by the evil stepmother. It was a variation of Snow White, Cimmerian style. At least there weren't seven dwarves.
Finally, Conan movies should be R rated. The world of Conan is violent, brutal, lusty and grim. Solutions to problems are found with the edge of a blade, not with talk. This watered-down milquetoast version of a Conan adventure was designed to pander to a family-friendly audience. There's plenty of family entertainment out there, and to adapt Conan to that environment is unnecessary and wrong.
It's too bad that John Milius was not in charge of this movie. The suits in Hollywood had their way and this movie stinks as a result. The fans lost, because instead of three movies we only got one good one, one bad one, and if a third is ever made, it won't star Arnold in the title role. What a missed opportunity. It could have been SO much better.
If you like the Conan stories, ignore this film, and stick to the one and only Conan movie.
Movie Review: Soylent Conan
Summary: 2 Stars
This movie was directed by Richard Fleischer, of "Soylent Green" fame. And everything about this movie is just about that hilariously bad. Here's what makes it total doo doo:
1) Script
2) Cast selection
3) Acting
4) Direction & Camera Work
5) Effects
6) The utter and absolute betrayal and abandonment of anything resembling RE Howard's Conan of Cimmeria.
I gave this movie a second star simply because there are a few funny moments that at least make this a lighhearted journey into awfulness.
Let me sum it up this way:
Remember in the *real* Conan movie when the black lotus seller tells Subotai and Conan: "Black lotus, Stygian, the best," and Subotai says, "This better not be hagga!" and the seller says, "I would not sell hagga to slayers such as yourselves."
Well, slayer, if you bought this movie you've just been sold a big fat bag of hagga....It ain't the real thing.
Movie Review: There is a streak of talent and imagination in it
Summary: 3 Stars
This movie is not without flaws, to put it mildly, the most glaring of them acting and dialogue. I won't spend any adjectives on those, although even there, completely unexpectedly, pop up curious and not unpleasant moments. Take the "How do you think flowers grow?" one-liner or the brief discussion of whether it was Malek's cousin's sister's brother or his brother's sister's cousin who had dug the escape tunnel out of Queen Taramis' Castle that Conan and the crew use as a side entrance. Both could be developed into something genuinely funny and perhaps even psychologically interesting - Malek, for instance, could have been made into more than the fool he officially becomes at the end - if, that is, the rest of the screenplay lived up to it. But these pretty notes immediately disappear among the actors' broken voices dragging their assigned lines like ski in the summer. The general feeling is that everything in the fridge has gone into this mish-mash, and some good stuff also, but neither the creators nor the audiences took notice.
The movie is visually interesting, too, even after all these years. Here I will, and with great pleasure, contradict previous reviewers who condemned the film's special effects as obsolete: puppets are a separate article from CGI and never ever lose their physical charm. You can poke a finger at the silly ape monster that Conan has to fight in Toth-Amon's castle and there will be plastic and rubber, I imagine, whereas as lively as, say, Gollum or the trolls were in "The Lord of the Rings," nobody could for a moment think they were anything but figments, carved out of nothing, akin more to images on the retina than anything remotely real. You might think that movies, fantasy movies especially, needn't have anything real, but the CGI technology has not yet advanced to the point where it can truly fool the eye, and until it does there will be steady pleasure in puppet work. Moreover, puppets are artworks in themselves, of varied quality: I dare anyone to watch Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" or even his weaker "Dark Crystal" and not be amazed, even today, at the characters that populate them. So much for the aging argument.
That is not to say, of course, that Conan's puppets are uniformly impressive. For the most part they are as underdone as the rest of the movie. As someone else has said, the ape monster's face does not move, plus the actor within the costume obviously knew nothing about wrestling. Dagoth could have used additional mobility and he suffers, as does the rest of the picture, from indifferent camera work. With just a few shots from slightly farther away and from the back or from below it squeezing Conan could have become an unforgettable scene, provided this Carlo Rambaldi had taken care to improve on the model. And on it goes: sloppy writing, the root of all evil, extra-sloppy acting, even sloppy costume work. Why are the guardians of the Horn of Dagoth dressed like the members of a local BDSM club?
But lo, there is an imaginative touch here: the guardians have a leader, a wizard, and he orders them about wordlessly by a sharp clanging-together of his bracers. The idea deserves a respectful nod. And the scene develops into a regrettably brief but exciting battle of sorcery as the leader tries to overpower Akiro, who is Conan's enchanter companion. To come back once more to the ape monster, despite the absurdity of it and the strained acting during the whole Crystal Palace chapter that mows down suspension of disbelief as soon as it sprouts, the episode with Thoth-Amon's (but why the name?) castle on the whole manages to inspire. On-again, off-again: the bird of smoke into which Thoth-Amon transforms and its slow flight over the lake, accompanied as they are by Basil Poledouris' quiet track, are impossible to take one's eyes off, but the bird's claws reaching for the princess are unconvincing and we are never shown her actually getting seized.
So it goes: occassional good ideas and talented presentation nearly drowned out by the boring rest and never explained. These highlights are something to watch out for, and everything else you can ignore, so I will now name a few. Shadizar. The giant bones in the desert. Mako as Akiro the Wizard. Sometimes Olivia d'Abo as Princess Jehna. The villagers attacking Zula and their settlement. Toth-Amon's face, gauntlet and cloak. The bird of smoke and the mirror room fight. The wizard competition and the way the two wizards recognize each other. The marble statue of Dagoth, the slime that runs down its face once the horn is in, Dagoth in his monstrous form. You may find others, but probably not many.
Is the movie worth watching, then? It is, although you will cringe a lot. Is it worth buying? I don't know, but, to speak of filthy lucre, Best Buy sells "Conan: The Complete Quest," which includes both movies, for 15 dollars.
Movie Review: Right in it's big ugly face!
Summary: 5 Stars
I caught this movie on cable the other day. It was an amazing fantasy-action movie with Arnold Shwartsanegger (sp?) in it as a powerful warrior. It's got all of the sword-fighting and adventure and magic that you could ask for. However, the best part of the entire movie is when Conan the Destroyer is riding on his horse with his Master-Thief, and confronts a camel. The camel spits a foul looking foam all over Conan the Destroyer's face. He gives it this amazing look and then POW!! He throws a hay-maker style punch right to the camel's face and knocks it out cold!! This has got to be one of my favorite scenes in just about any movie, ever. This 5-star punch makes this a Tuttleman approved, 5 star movie. It makes me want to punch a camel SOOOO bad in real life. I made a promise to myself that I will knock out a camel before I die, even if it's a zoo-camel that just happens to "get too close" to the cage-bars. And no, I'm not kidding or trying to be funny.
In conclusion, when I make my video compilation of the top 100 greatest action scenes ever laid to film, this will be right up there along side that part in Resident Evil where the girl kicks a dog out of mid-air with a slow-motion kick to the chin. And also a scene from a movie Lyle showed me called "Zombie" where a zombie leaps over-board off of a boat and takes on the great-white-shark, one-on-one. Also that part in Crocodile-Dundee where Crocidile Dundee wrestles a crocodile and stabs it through the skull with a bowie-knife. I love animal-action scenes where people fight animals in movies!! It's one of my favorite kinds of conflicts: Man vs. Animal!! Alright, I'm highly inspired to go work on that tape now. I don't want to write anymore right now so go do something else please. Later.
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