The success of Conan the Barbarian (1981) mean that a sequel was a given. By 1984, the rights to the character had passed to Dino De Laurentiis who put his daughter Raffaella in charge and suggested director Richard Fleischer when the original’s John Milius proved to be unavailable. Fleischer seemed to be a safe pair of hands – he’d made many an action-adventure film, among them Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Fantastic Voyage (1966), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and most pertinently, The Vikings (1958), another swashbuckling tale of derring-do.
But Fleischer was hampered from the off by the decision to tone down the violence of the Milius. If Conan the Barbarian could take $40 million at the box office with a ‘R’ rating, De Laurentiis reasoned, how much more would Destroyer make with a ‘PG’? The answer was, rather less – the sequel proved to be a box office disappointment and banked just £31 million. While Conan the Destroyer (a nonsensical title that has no bearing on the plot) is a less violent and more light-hearted film compared to its terribly earnest, shorter and more pulpy, unfortunately, it’s certainly not any better.
The script came from Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas – the latter had been writing the generally very good Conan comic for Marvel while ethe former had been working on the companion comic based on another of Conan creator Robert E. Howard’s fantasy characters, Kull the Conqueror. Their original script was polished by Stanley Mann and the result is a by-the-numbers quest story that satisfies no-one.
Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and the thief Malak (Tracey Walter) are challenged by Queen Taramis of Shadizar (Sarah Douglas) to undertake a ques for her in return for her restoring Conan’s recently deceased love, Valeria (Sandahl Bergman in a very brief cameo). He’s charged with protecting the Queen’s niece, Princess Jehnna (Olivia d’Abo) as she first retrieves a magic jewel and then then restores it to a jewelled horn that she must place on a statue of the dreaming god Dagoth. Conan and Malak are joined by Bombaata (Wilt Chamberlain), the captain of Taramis’s guard and later by the wizard Akiro, the Wizard of the Mounds (Mako – it’s not sure if this is meant to be the same character he played in the first film) and female warrior Zula (pop star Grace Jones). They arrive at the castle of the sorcerer Thoth-Amon (Pat Roach), who kidnaps Jehnna. After Conan defeats him in a battle in a room of mirrors, they eventually reach an ancient temple where they learn that the virginal Jehnna obtains is to be sacrificed to Dagoth.
The script is the biggest problem here, a generic sword-and-sorcery adventure with the oldest plot the genre has to offer – hero sets off on a mission to rescue a princess, picks up allies along the way, gets into a lot of fights and lives to save the day. There’s nothing here that we hadn‘t read innumerable times in the plethora of second-rate fantasy novels that had proliferated in the 1970s. The script strands its cast of mostly terrible performers with little to do – there’s an awful lot of grunting and flamboyant arm waving going on in lieu of decent dialogue (“I suppose nothing hurst you?” asks Jehenna. “Only pain,” deadpans Conan) and way too many examples of characters excitedly telling us what we can see with our own two eyes.
There are some nice moments of photography (from regular Fleischer collaborator Jack Cardiff – they’d worked together on The Vikings) and set design (courtesy of Pier Luigi Basile and John Bloomquist) but all too often the film simply looks bland. Some very ropey effects, particularly some awful back projection, don’t help and Basil Poledouris fails to match the bombast of his score for the first film. During the climactic attempted sacrifice of Jehenna, his cues sound like they came from an entirely different film and he got the cue sheets muddled up on the day of recording.
The Dagoth monster seen mercifully briefly in the final moments is a travesty, a sub-par rubber suit (worn, uncredited, by André the Giant) though its name is intriguing – with its webbed hands one wonders if it was inspired by the aquatic god of Mesopotamian and Canaanite belief, Dagon, popularised by H.P. Lovecraft in the 1917 short story named after its monster. One can‘t help but wonder what it might have turned out like if Ray Harryhausen hadn‘t retired and been allowed to work his magic on it.
Conan the Destroyer opened to mixed reviews and less enthusiasm from the public than they’d sown for the first film and plans to complete a trilogy with Conan the Conqueror were put on hold. Fleischer went on to make Red Sonja (1985) based on the character, created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith for a Marvel Comics series, based in turn on Howard’s Red Sonya of Rogatino. Brigitte Nielsen took the leading role, Sandahl Bergman returned as Queen Gedren of Berkubane, Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared as the Conan-like Lord Kalidor and audiences stayed away in droves. Plans for Conan the Conqueror were finally laid to rest when the script was rewritten to accommodate another Howard creation, Kull the Conqueror in 1997, directed by John Nicolella. After the terrible 2011 version of Conan the Barbarian, Schwarzenegger expressed an interest in returning to the role in The Legend of Conan which the star maintained was still very much a going concern in 2019 and that the title had changed to Conan the King. The plan is to pick up from the final shot of the original Conan the Barbarian and visit an older Conan once he’s assumed the throne of Aquilonia.
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