In the terms of the vast number of Marvel films we'll be covering on this blog, there's a few with slightly tenuous connections to the comic book giant but "Conan The Barbarian" and its two follow-ups are probably gonna need a bit of explanation behind them. Probably best known 35 odd years later as the film that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger's career, the Conan character was actually the creation of 1930s pulp fiction writer Robert Howard. However, in the 1970s, Marvel bought the rights to the character from Howard's estate and made a comic book series from the stories which actually had a pretty impressive run right up to 1993.
In fact, Conan was one of Marvel's more successful titles of the 1970s and there was talk about turning it into a film as early as the mid-'70s although it took a few years to get the funding and backing together meaning it didn't see the light of day until 1982. Although the story of the film differs from both the comics and Howard's original novels, the writer of the series for Marvel did have a hand in putting the script together and, indeed, there was a film special edition of the comic made by Marvel as a tie-in. Therefore, sod it, it's going in. Not least because otherwise we would've had a seven year gap at this point and it would've been "Howard The Duck" that I'd have been reviewing this week. And if you've ever seen that film, you can probably understand why I'm fairly keen to put that one off for a while if possible...
Anyway, the film kicks off with Conan as a young whippersnapper, the son of a swordsmith in a barbarian village with his dad explaining the mysteries of the swords he makes to him. However, just a few minutes into the film Conan's village is attacked by evil marauders with Conan's dad being impaled by a spear and then eaten by dogs and his mum being hypnotised by the marauders' leader Thulsa (James Earl Jones) and then beheaded using his dad's sword. One thing that's evident from the off, this is actually quite a gory film for the time (obviously put it next to one of the Marvel Netflix series and it's generally pretty tame), certainly a lot more so than the '70s Marvel films we've seen so far.
Conan and the other kids from the village are sold into slavery and we see them pushed into service rotating a big mill wheel on a hill. Exactly why they're doing this is never explained but we see the seasons changing, the number of people pushing the wheel decreasing and the kids still there getting bigger and bigger until it's just Arnie pushing the wheel around on his own, the implication presumably being that the other kids all died from exhaustion in the intervening 15 years or so.
Arnie, sorry, Conan is eventually sold off to become a gladiator and turns out to be a bit good at it to the extent that he becomes the slavemaster's prize fighter, being given training, an education and the pick of the tribe's women to have sex with (while the rest of the local deviants watch...eww, okay, that's a bit weird).
Conan is eventually given his freedom and for some reason the first thing he does is get chased across the moors by wild dogs which eventually leads to him falling into a tomb and picking up a sword off of a skeleton king.
He then randomly finds himself in a village where some skank who turns out to be a witch seduces him and tells him about some great prophecy involving two snakes. Unfortunately she then turns into a vampire mid-coitus and tries to kill Conan (don't you just hate it when that happens) who ends up throwing her on to a fire to get rid of her. As you may have gathered from the last two paragraphs this film is quite incredibly random.
Conan finds a bloke chained up outside the witch's house who's a thief called Subotai. As the witch is dead, he frees him and the two become travelling companions. They head to the nearest city to find out information about the prophecy where Conan also punches a camel for no apparent reason. Like I say, random.
In the middle of the city is a huge tower with snake heads on it and our two heroes deduce that this must be something to do with the prophecy. While trying to break in, they encounter another thief, Valeria, who they become allies with.
The tower turns out to be the headquarters for some weird snake-obsessed cult and while Valeria distracts them, Conan and Subotai go down and raid the vaults including a huge red emerald with Conan also getting in an inadvertently funny fight with a snake which was clearly shot massively close up to make it seem big. All together now - "For the last time, these ones are small...but the ones out there are far away...Small...far away..."
The team escape the temple and Conan and Valeria have a night of drunken passion together but it's interrupted by them being arrested by town soldiers (Conan doesn't have a lot of luck in having an uninterrupted night with the ladies evidently) and taken to King Ozric. The king (played by Max Von Sydow) offers the team a quest to rescue his daughter from none other than Thulsa, the guy who killed Conan's parents at the start of the film. Valeria and Subotai say no, rightly thinking it's a bit too dangerous but Conan wants revenge and signs up for it.
After getting directions to Thulsa's mountain lair from a group of travellers, Conan happens upon a wizard called Akiro who lives in the middle of a graveyard and gives him some flowers which will allow him to infiltrate Thulsa's followers. So yes, that above is a shot of Arnie riding a camel with some flowers. Because...why not?
Conan knocks an incredibly camp priest out to steal his robes but the other cult members see through his disguise incredibly quickly and after a quick torture and lecture session at the hands of Thulsa he's sent out to be crucified (all together now, "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy...").
Incidentally Jones sticks out like a sore thumb in this film - while everyone else is giving giant sequoia style levels of wooden acting, he's carrying on like he's auditioning for "King Lear" or something. Admirable but it's a bit out of place in a film which features the main character getting into a punch-up with a vulture that's trying to eat him on the cross!
Valeria and Subotai eventually show up to rescue Conan and take him back to Akiro's place to be healed. This appears to be done by giving him the mother of all-over tattoo jobs then leaving him to heal during the night, during which a bunch of evil spirits show up and try to abduct him (hilariously bad '80s special FX alert!) but his companions manage to keep him safe.
The trio decide to infiltrate Thulsa's temple, seemingly by disguising themselves as the most unconvincing Kiss tribute act ever. When they get there, the cult members are having an orgy and eating soup made from human body parts...nice.
Thulsa, however, sees them coming and transforms into a giant snake before the three of them go loco on his followers and rescue the princess. However, on the way out of the lair, Thulsa shoots Valeria with a snake arrow, killing her.
Swearing vengeance, Conan and Subotai go back to wait at Akiro's graveyard for Thulsa's followers to show up, setting a number of traps around the place. The three of them manage to fight off Thulsa's soldiers with one of his two henchmen falling victim to a nasty looking "spike on a giant wheel" trap and the other being seen off by Valeria who briefly reappears as a Valkyrie to rescue Conan (hey hang on, isn't that Thor's storyline? Conan goes on about Valhalla in the film too...weird)
Thulsa manages to escape back to his temple and is holding another rally for his followers but he doesn't take into account that Conan and the princess have both followed him. He tries to hypnotise Conan but Arnie ain't falling for that one and promptly decapitates him. With their leader gone, the cult followers simply drop their torches into the pool at the bottom of the temple steps and disperse with Arnie torching the stone temple (!) before leaving with the princess. End of film.
Okay so it's cheesy as hell, the dialogue is pretty terrible, the acting's more wooden than an Ikea workshop and a lot of the plot makes little or no sense but at least "Conan" does feel like a step up from the films we've seen so far in this blog in that at least the action here is pretty continuous over its two hours and there's plenty of satisfyingly gruesome fight scenes. In short, although it's very much of its time, at least it felt like the film makers were actually trying here and it's an enjoyably no-brainer way to waste a couple of hours and that's enough to put it up at the top of the table for now. It was also a huge success at the box office (making it a bit of an anomaly in terms of what we've reviewed on here so far) spawning two sequels which we'll look at in the next two blogs.
And Arnie? Well, in between this and the second Conan film he'd go on to star in "The Terminator". Which then spawned a follow-up which gave rise to this...
(NB - Yes, I realise that the above statement has little to no bearing on what we're discussing here and that isn't actually Arnie on Top of the Pops there. But I do think that song is long overdue a critical reappraisal 😉)
FINAL RATING: 🗡🗡🗡🗡🗡🗡 6/10
CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE
1. Conan The Barbarian (1982) (6/10)
2. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
3. Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (1979) (4/10)
4. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
5. Spiderman: The Dragon's Challenge (1979) (3/10)
6. Captain America (1979) (2/10)
7. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)
NEXT WEEK: The inevitable sequel. Well, it's not like there was a lot else about in terms of Marvel films in the early '80s...
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