Tagline: The Darkest Side of Magic. The Strongest Side of
Curiosity: Oh hey, Conan’s back! And now he’s a destroyer!
Plot: Queen Taramis (Sara Douglas) convinces Conan (Arnold Brownschwagger) to take her virginal niece Jehna (Olivia D’Abo) on a quest to find a horn so they can awaken Andre the Giant [NOTE: According to the scholarly source Wikipedia, I am not kidding.]. She promises him some pretty cool stuff. Stuff I can’t reveal because it would spoil the ending to Conan the Barbarian, but I will say that it’s pretty great. Except she is filled with lies! She tells Jehna’s guardian, Bombaata (Wilt Chamberlain), to kill Conan and Jehna. What a dick!
Also Grace Jones shows up for a while and makes scary faces.
Thoughts: I’ll give Destroyer this: It’s better paced than Barbarian. The gang heads out to find a magical horn, they find it, and then they fight the bad guys. Shit is tight, and the final fight scene is cool to boot.
Yet somehow it’s still kind of a crappy movie. The gang of bandits Conan assembles (Jones, Malak, and Mako, the only other returning Barbarian cast member) do jack-shit the entire movie. The same is nearly true of Chamberlain, who spends the whole dang movie acting like such a huge prick to Conan that it’s hard to believe the guy never says anything about it. Ancient warriors hate talking about feelings, apparently.
In an inverted twist, the film’s attempts at comedy are awful, while plenty of scenes are unintentionally funny. An extended bit where Conan gets drunk feels… weird and wrong. The filmmakers are going for “funny drunk,” but Conan’s speaking style is so disconcertingly spacey that I kept waiting for him to pull a Buffalo Bill or something. Meanwhile, Conan punches horses left and right, and IT’S AWESOME.
Speaking of the horses, the filmmakers took some flak from animal right’s groups over whether or not animals were harmed during the production of the first film. This time around, the director made sure audiences could see horses get up after every stunt, which happens an awful lot. Viewers get scene after scene of decapitations and stabbings, but the pretty horsies always walk away unscathed.
Anyway, Destroyer is the more formulaic, sterile brother of Barbarian. So there.
Reflection: GRACE JONES PLEASE STOP YELLING AT ME.
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