Conan, what is best in life?
Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women!
With dialogue like that, you know you’re not dealing with All About Eve. But then again, that 1950 classic’s conspicuously bereft of head-lopping, stabbing, pillaging, and giant snakes; so there’s some trade-off involved.
The Grand Illusion Cinema rings in October with some serious sword-and-sandal action beginning tonight. Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer–both showcasing the Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the title role–play October 1 through 7, and red-blooded fans of action cinema owe it to themselves to take a peek.
Conan the Barbarian’s the keeper here, a fantasy epic whose blend of sturm und drang weight and good old-fashioned blood-and-boobs-laden action plays pretty damned well today. It follows the odyssey of the title character (Ah-nuld), a muscular warrior who leads a life of thievery while pursuing vengeance against the (literal) monster of a ruler who slaughtered Conan’s family, Thulsa Doom (creepily played by James Earl Jones).
Author Robert E. Howard’s mythic melange of two-fisted sword-wielding warriors, monsters, and frequently-undressed maidens finds a perfect latter-day interpreter in director John Milius, a guy whose machismo previously manifested itself in screenplays for a couple of the Dirty Harry movies and Apocalypse Now. Milius and his co-screenwriter Oliver Stone treat this pulp universe with a little bit too much gravitas sometimes, but Milius leavens the weightiness with a thuggish sense of humor and plenty of rip-roaring battles royale.
Schwarzenegger was never much of an actor, but his charisma’s undeniable here, and Milius surrounds the muscleman with an ace supporting cast: Sandahl Bergman’s pure feline grace as Conan’s ass-kicking dream chick; Max von Sydow has a field day as jovial King Osric; Mako brings his customary impish twinkle to his role as Official Exposition Carrier; and biker-movie stalwart William “Big Bill” Smith steals the first quarter of the movie as Conan’s dad, a man so bad-assed it takes a dozen guys in armor, an ax in the chest, and two attack dogs to bring him down.
Add in a terrific orchestral score from the late great Basil Poledouris, still-impressive set design, and overt visual references to everything from Sergio Leone to Blazing Saddles, and you’ve got a spectacle that should still look pretty amazing on a genuine movie screen.
Conan the Barbarian brought in decent but not stellar box office returns, so producer Dino de Laurentiis crafted the sequel with a broader audience in mind. This meant toning down the violence and sex for a PG rating (boo, hiss), and making the sequel a half-hour shorter than its predecessor. Conan the Destroyer isn’t all bad–there’s a goodly share of swordplay, Mako’s back, and the amusing shaggy-dog cast includes pro basketball god Wilt ‘The Stilt’ Chamberlain and a glowering Grace Jones. But it’s unmemorably helmed by old hand Richard Fleischer (who did much better with 1958’s lusty The Vikings), and a lot less entertaining than most of the original Conan’s imitators. Give me The Beastmaster, The Sword and the Sorceror, or Yor, Hunter from the Future over Conan the Destroyer any day of the millennium.
If you want to see a seriously entertaining bad sequel, however, stick around for the Illusion’s late-night presentation of The Howling II tonight and Saturday. It picks up right where the stone-classic 1981 original left off, with Ben White (the brother of the Karen White character from the first Howling) discovering his sibling’s lycanthropic origins and jaunting off to Transylvania with a charismatic stranger (the unimpeachably awesome Christopher Lee) to battle Stirba the Werewolf Queen (played with scenery-chewing sexiness by B-movie siren Sybil Danning).
Don’t look at the original as some sort of sacred totem, and The Howling II packs much schlocky enjoyment in its 91 minutes–exploding eyeballs, ridiculous transformation scenes featuring refurbished ape suits, rib-tickling dialogue, a comfort-food character actor cast (in addition to Lee and Danning, eighties beefcake hero Reb Brown plays the heroic Ben), a really cool theme song that sounds like Blancmange jamming with Bauhaus, and heaping helpings of gratuitous sex and violence. How gratuitous? Stick around through the (very NSFW) closing credits to see the same footage of Danning ripping her top off, replayed eighteen times. And yes, someone out there besides me counted.
After Ivar’s sent some samples of tartar sauce and cocktail sauce, my partner and I decided to speed over to the seafood section to prepare food for sauce tasting.