p e n g u i n d e v i l

Of course, as those loyal readers may remember from an earlier post… When I have events to go to, I don’t go. So yes, I skipped the Zompire FF after all… .

I know, everyone was waiting to hear about Choking Hazard… Well, I have got something better!

It is an ancient tale of a powerful man, a soldier, thief and king… skin painted with stripes and wielding the greatest gift of the gods, a sword of steel… He comes down from Cimmeria, with greed in his eyes, revenge in his heart and blood splattered across his chest! Yes, it is Conan the Cimmerian, the focal character of fantasy literature created by Robert Howard (in his short and Lovecraftian life style).

This well-remembered film, Conan the Barbarian, from Dino De Laurentius, Oliver Stone and John Milius, starts off with a touching parenting moment reminiscent of Charlton Heston (if he had been in a historical drama of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father), passing down religion and history and knowledge… but then Doom comes calling…

The movie is a standard coming of age story of a young boy, filled with: the slaughter of the parents, enslavement to a grain wheel and years of fighting in the pits until his biceps are the size of my waist, it is an adventure straight out of Boy’s Life!

Once he is freed from his captors, our hero wanders the dunes, raids a long forgotten tomb, gains his first sword, his first friend, and, now a sort of buddy movie, heads off to the big city to track down the man who killed his people: the 1000-year old “Servant of Set” Thulsa Doom. Now we get to the meat of the story. Conan is nominally an Arnold movie (capitalizing on his fame as a weightlifter) but it’s really all about James Earl Jones, as in the contemporary Star Wars movies where you only hear his voice, Jones can’t play supporting to anyone. He’s just too great a character.

For other outstanding characters, there are Max Von Sydow as the sad King Osric, full of despair at Doom’s acquisition of his daughter (Osric was my favorite character) and Doom’s right hand men, Rexor and Thorgrim were awesome! Thorgrim wielded the biggest hammer ever to grace the screen and Rexor had about the roughest looking bar-brawl face I’ve seen yet…. whatever band they were cast from must really rock. I kept thinking of KK Downing and Lemmy whenever they were on the screen.

Osric.

which way to the stage?

Arnold, though, is a bit silly and unconvincing as Conan (though once he shows up at the hippy den surrounding Doom, you can’t wait from him to break out the sword and break some flower draped skulls), he continually reminds you of the liberties taken with the original stories which, though it has been many moons since I read these books, in the movie they make the character too goofy and they make it a bit much of a romance. But the story that they tell is still good.There are dopey musical interludes, good action scenes (particularly the bloodwork.. effective, yet not excessive, it looks quite nice), surprisingly good character development, a great soundtrack, and interesting sets which, while they may not be to elaborate, they have a nice feel to them and work well at getting across the sense of the setting… the costumes though, aren’t too hot. While they are stylistically good, they just look a bit too much like costumes. Basically, an entertaining and well-balanced film. An action adventure with not too much of either: not too much action to harm the story and the characters, yet enough to get you jumping in your chair! A classic adventure film well worth plopping down for a couple of hours with…