Eye Candy #25 - "Conan the Barbarian"

Conan the Barbarian: This film, with rare exception, is single-handedly responsible for making more people play Dungeons & Dragons than any other factor on the planet. I mean, who wouldn’t be inspired the sword and sorcery hijinks of Conan (as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), the damsels in distress and skimpy leather outfits, the implied sex with the vaguest hint of nudity, otherworldly villains played by former NFL football players, and James Earl Jones with bright green eyes...need I say more? Directed by Man’s Man John Milius (who also gave us the fantastic “Red Dawn”), this is everything a young impressionable boy would need to see to want to get in on that action, to use the parlance of the times, and invest in some five-sided dice and player-characters sheets. Maybe even his own Monster Manual. Why, you might even want to invest your own sword and leather loincloth. SCA dreams are made of these. Based on Robert E. Howard’s “Conan the Cimmerian” stories, this film is just a lot of silly fun, heavy on mumbo, light on jumbo. Schwarzenegger is well-cast as the taciturn Conan, James Earl Jones is good against type as the snake priest Thulsa Doom (I'm going to name my first kid "Thulsa"), Sandahl Bergman is blond and runs around in leather (and do you really need her to do anything else), and Max Von Sydow over-acts his rear off as King Osric the Usurper. And any movie that has Mako in it is worth at least two stars at minimum. Add in the immortal William Smith on top of that, and you have a formula for a film that can’t possibly do anything but succeed. Wish there were more films like this (you would have thought with the success of LOTR that we would have seen a bunch of derivative fantasy stuff aimed at adults, but we haven’t). Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”