Round 2 of the Conan/Beastmaster Showdown!!!

 Hey everyone! (apparently a lot more than two of you if the numbers on the article I posted yesterday are accurate at all! Thank you all so much!) Previously, my most-read article on this blog was my Escape from New York review, with 59 views in the last uh... two years or so? Snake Plissken, my top performer!

But, inexplicably, since the posting on Monday night of the first part of this deep dive into muscle-bound 80s fantasy, I've gotten over 190 reads on that one! That's a... well, it's a bit of a shot in the arm to the old ego, and I appreciate it...

You didn't come here for my imaginary award acceptance speech though, so let's get back to work shall we?

LET'S GET READY TO FLEX!!!!

So where did I leave off yesterday? Something about Darth Vader being...something... I had a few more references to Star Wars than I thought I would... Oh RIGHT!

BAD GUYS!

"Heard you were callin' Darth Vader a bitch..."

Yipe...

III: "THEY WILL ALL DROWN IN LAKES OF BLOOD...": Sinister Sorcerers of the 80's Fantasy Movie Renaissance

Villains are just as important to a story staying memorable as the hero, if not more so. Would Star Wars have hit the way it did if Darth Vader was, in fact, a little bitch? 

Would Vader be as intimidating if the asthmatic breathing was punctuated with an inhaler, or perhaps if Grand Moff Tarkin took a break during his monologues to apply Chap-stick?

Of course not.

 And a big part of what made Darth Vader memorable was a Mississippi-born stutterer that had come up through the ranks of actors on the strength of his powerhouse performances and his powerhouse of a voice, regularly used to give something the gravitas it was lacking. Like he did for this little fantasy picture here.

That's right I'm talking about James Earl Jones, nearly throwing his damn back out carrying this movie over the finish line to respectable status back in the day because "Oh, HE'S in it? But he's like, a real actor..." And yes, he's in Conan the Barbarian playing the immortal leader of a snake cult.

And looking fly as fuck doing it, thanks very much.

I will remember Thulsa Doom for as long as I live for a lot of reasons, not the lowest of which is how striking he is on screen. I mean there's stage presence and then there's convincing a little boy that you're an evil sorcerer who was born in Atlantis and has the voice of God from a stop-motion movie about the Book of Genesis we had when I was little. That's what is colloquially referred to as The Real Shit.

A big part of this is really cool choice made by the production team and director John Milius of wanting to fully recreate what Atlanteans looked like according to Robert E. Howard. In his essay "The Hyborian Age" and his works about the proto-Conan Kull the Conqueror, the natives of Atlantis are described as generally having straight black hair, dark drown skin, and piercing blue eyes. And sure, the effect is simply achieved with a wig and contacts, but LOOK at the effect it gives:

This, combined with Jones absolute commitment to bringing his A game to this, (even though he joined the production pretty late, signing on to play Doom just a few weeks before filming began) creates a character that is downright otherworldly,  especially to kid from the painfully rural sticks whose first meeting with an actual, real black person was still several years in the future from his first viewing of Conan. If you'd have told me that he had blue eyes in real life, and wore brown contacts to not freak people out, I would have believed you. 

That's less of a testament to the power of Jones' performance here and more to how tub-thumpingly dumb I was as a kid, but still.

Like, I almost feel bad pivoting over to Beastmaster here, because when comparing to something this iconic..? Any comparison is going to come off as a dunk on the other movie and I am trying to be fair, y'know?

So yeah, let's talk High Priest Maax.

I'm just gonna re-use this pic because it looks metal as hell,
and he needs the advantage in this match-up.

I'll start off by noting a big similarity in the characterization of both Maax and Thulsa Doom that might have led folks to think there was indeed some copying of homework here.

Both of the bad guys in these films know the same secret about really making it big in savage, lawless ur-civilizations from the mists of pre-history: Doing the Brutal Warlord shtick and leading your Huns across the tundra for plunder is fine for if ya want a little fun in your work and building up your seed money for a larger venture, but the REAL MONEY? We're talking the BIG BUCKS?

"Can I get an AMEN?"
"AAAGGGHHH!!!"
"Halfway there, keep going!"

Being the leader of an Evil Death Cult is where it's at, baby. You offer people power, structure, and a seat on the Mother-ship and man, they will swallow anything! And no, I don't think that fruit punch has a funny aftertaste, at all. You enjoy, though! I'll be over here with my bottle of water- I'm trying to cut down on my sugar. 

Where the comparison of these cults begins to show the difference between our chief antagonists though, is in their motives for forming them. Maax is all about grasping for power at all costs, usurping the throne of King Zed, gouging out the Kings eyes and throwing him in the dungeon, and taking his pet horde of barbarian warriors out for a nice pillage now and then to help gain new resources and slaves for his burgeoning totalitarian theocracy. And to be clear, that's fine. This is all stuff right out of the Dark Sorcerer Playbook and he's just following all that shit to the letter, doing it all exactly right. But that's pretty much his only motivation, and his insistence upon total domination coupled with his demands for constant ritual sacrifice, (along with turning all his dissenters into animalistic,  barely controllable, living homunculi called Death Guards) has left the city-state of Aruk looking kind of like that town that used to really nice until the mall died.

Doom, on the other hand, is rumored to be over a thousand years old, and when confronted with the brutal realities of his destructive rampages and the effect they have had on out hero Conan's entire existence up to now, he sighs and ruefully says, "It must have been when I was younger..." in a way that presages Raul Julia's take on M. Bison and his brilliant delivery of "For me? It was Tuesday..." by quite a handful of years.

He barely remembers burning down an entire village and beheading a kid's mother before her child's eyes, then selling that child off into slavery because he has been at this whole Dark Sorcerer bit for SO LONG that he has honestly been kind of coasting for the last 300 years or so, moving from one little passion project to the next, corrupting and toppling city-states, plundering, gathering brainwashed followers to do it all again, rape, pillage, repeat and it's all gotten a little... samey... 

Such to the point that he's created a whole new Doom Cult complete with hordes of followers, big-ass snake temples in every major city in the tri-state area of the Hyborian landscape, and a fortress headquarters known as his Mountain of Power (playset available now!), where he proselytizes to his worshipers,  leads huge R-rated orgies of sex, death, and cannibalism, and occasionally turns into a giant snake. All this is Thulsa Doom...on auto-pilot.

"Imagine what I could do if I was really trying..."

And yeah, I always found it a little intimidating in the first place that Thulsa Doom was able to build all this up while also really... not giving that much of a fuck? Like, it's been a millennium since his people fell and his nation was drowned by cataclysm, and honesty? I bet he barely remembers those days. Hell, he barely remembers last week. He's probably had minions that he called by their grandfather's name because their bloodline has been devoted to him for centuries and they've all started to look alike to Doom. And that so much is communicated in so little screen time and such a powerful performance is a clear indicator that on a one to one? On demagogic sorcerous staying power alone? There really is no basis for competition here. All respect to the late Rip Torn, but his Maax is a pantomime of villainy that evokes a Saturday morning cartoon and a greasy televangelist. Maax couldn't take Doom at his weakest on his literal best day. What James Earl Jones could do with a wig and contact lenses, Torn couldn't pull off with a bunch of braids and the biggest wax nose I've seen outside of a pair of Groucho glasses.

Where Doom does fall down a bit is that his minions are kinda bland, with his right and left-hand men both basically just being bigger, dumber, evil versions of Conan who, while they look impressive, contribute all of zippo to the story.

Maax on the other hand, does make up for his own pettiness and poor management style with a plethora of fascinating diversity hires: We have the Witches dor style, along with his Brotherhood of Richard O'Brien Look-Alikes, keeping themselves busy until Alex Proyas makes Dark City in the 90s, His Jun Horde and their bat-helmeted war chief, then for flavor we have Maax's S&M berserkers called Death Guards, who I believe I've already mentioned.

Could one uncharitably call this "Quantity over Quality?" Perhaps, but me? I've always liked a bit of variety in my play. In other words, if say Thulsa Doom had a trio of Hustler House of Horrors Witches, a bunch of Warduke lookin' minions that just got back from their cover shoot for Pillager of Fortune magazine, Bondage monsters, and the Brothers Riff-Raff in his Mountain of Power (playset comes with everything you see here, Orgy sold separately), I don't think there would have been any debate in my mind which was better because that would have been the greatest shit I ever saw.

Icons on both sides to be sure, but one is clearly carrying his weight in the long haul and the other is getting killed by a ferret.

IV:"Us pilgrims should stick together..."- Supporting Cast and Story

Don't call yourself a metal fan
if you can't name this band...

I've given some lip service to the rest of the cast in the earlier parts of the retrospective, but let's pull ourselves away from the bigger icons of these two flicks for a moment, and really give some attention to these...well, not unsung, but under-sung perhaps, heroes that help the heroes and villains do stuff in these classics, and how they affect the story.

I want to start with the ones who so often get overlooked, even when they're on the poster, those characters that only ever seem to exist to be at the feet of the hero looking ever so impressed: the Ladies. In pulp Sword and Sorcery tales of the time, Robert Howard was constantly being told that they wouldn't take his stories unless there were pretty girls in them, so that then there could be pretty girls on the cover, and therefore magazine would sell. Howard tended to roll his eyes and acquiesce because we all gotta eat, bro. 

And as such, until he got really tired of the whole damsel/bimbo archeype always cluttering up his stories so they could heave their bosoms on the cover of Weird Tales and created some real fantastical heroines in characters like Belit the Pirate Queen and Red Sonja, that was the template he set out for other artists to follow. And it's... deceptively simple, because there's actually a lot to unpack in there. A lot of attitudes that view women as not-quite-people, or simply prizes to be won, or that at least most of them are. And I'm hardly starting a revolution here calling out sexism in old-timey stories written in the 30s by men for men, it is still disappointing to see so much of it still on display fifty years later in these offerings from 1982. Cruising on towards nearly 100 years from when these tales were told, it feels like maybe we're finally getting somewhere. And here is where I get off that particular high-horse and address another way that Conan outshines Beastmaster, but it's only just. Sadly, both of them have aged pretty poorly in this regard.

But let's start by saying that Kiri is no Valeria, that's for damn sure.

And that can be shown off in just their introductions to the tale. Conan and Subotai encounter Valeria for the first time while sneaking into the Temple of Set to steal some shit after getting high one night (y'know, boys being boys), and find her lurking in the shadows with a sword. the three immediately start squaring up... then square up again...then both realize "hey, you actually know what you're doing" with the exchange:

Conan: "You're not a guard..."

Valeria: "Neither are you." 

Kiri, on the other paw...

I think I had this calendar as a kid...

...is introduced while enjoying a nude swim with an equally buxom friend, and...

Look, I don't want to throw terms around that might ruin something for you, but I am just going to say it: even if we frame the first meeting between Kiri and Dar as being playful and not creepy (which it very is), there's still no getting around that she's an example of the Slave Girl trope, and therefore really can't consent to anything. And that makes the encounter feel like it just dances throughout on the very bleeding edge of assault. To Dar's credit- when he realizes she's a slave, he basically 100 percent backs off and is like "Oh, fuck, this just got a little too real..." BUT- if he had tried anything like that shit with Valeria she would have cut his balls off...

They do tack on a backstory that Kiri is actually some breed of warrior priestess later on, but that's all it feels like- something tacked on in a second draft, and the late Tanya Roberts never looks like anything but a swimsuit model carrying a knife; whereas Sandahl Bergman took intensive dancing training and channeled that into her fight training, then went so hard during the filming of her battle scenes that she nearly lost a finger.

Pictured: Sandahl "I tend not to fuck around" Bergman

Now, this isn't to say that Conan comes out the clear winner here, either- the older I get the more I find the "Bred to the finest stock" scene gross and troubling (from the overt Orientalism of the entire 'trained in the East' section of his origin to the way they are both compared to live stock in the scene and the narration), and there is no getting around that Valeria lays her whole ass heart out to Conan in a scene of intense and beautiful sincerity of how she wants to do whatever they do together and never be left to fend for herself in the world again now that she has him, and that what they have is greater than any king's ransom or revenge... And he just leaves. Because in the world of Conan, revenge is more important than being a good partner, I guess. And in the long run, her biggest role in the story is to die to motivate Conan to further vengeance against a guy he was already dead-set on avenging himself upon. And a character that is such a clear descendant of Belit deserves better than the fucking Fridge...

And on yet another hand, once certain familial ties are revealed with another supporting character, Tal, the film-makers of Beastmaster don't bother to clarify much as to whether Kiri is Dar's cousin or not...(she's not, but the film never bothers to correct the assumption that she is) So sadly the ladies remain a mixed bag here.

As for other supporting players, that is an area that Conan the Barbarian has always shined brighter than many fantasy films of the period. While the main trio were relative unknowns, with Gerry Lopez literally being a surfing buddy of John Milius before being cast as Subotai, to say the cast of Hyboria is star-studded can be an understatement: Along with the previously-fawned-over James Earl Jones, we have appearances from William "Big Bill" Smith, Max Von Sydow, and the utterly incredible, life-changing performance giver, Uncle Iroh HIMSELF, mother-fucking MAKO.

Pictured here, wondering where the fuck his jasmine tea is...

It seems that the overall philosophy with casting in Conan was that 'we are going to surround Arnold with stellar actors in the hopes that no one notices his chops in that department are not up to snuff just yet'. And for the most part, this does work- his natural screen presence carries him through a movie where the ostensible main character has barely any spoken dialog, his intent instead being made known by how he's sharpening his sword or a glare. it takes nearly half an hour before the film feels you're ready for Conan to string more than two sentences together. 

So having such incredible folks around him can take the edge off how out of his depth he can be in certain scenes, especially when having Von Sydow as a scene partner, or when Mako amiably carries him through his scenes with the Wizard, whose contributions as narrator really help give the film its overall mythic quality. Indeed, the film speaks best when it's not speaking at all- that opera feeling being the most evident in such sequences. As such, the supporting players contribute to the tapestry, but the story remains pretty straight-forward from first moment to last. 

Outside of the colossal fuck up at the end of act 2 that leaves Conan dying on a tree, even characters like Subotai and Valeria are basically just along for the ride. They rescue him, but it's also never explained how the hell they even found him. We're just kind of left to assume the Wizard did it, somehow.

Which is fair, I guess... This guys seems to know his shit.

The supporting cast of Conan shine more in character scenes than they do in scenes that further the story, with my favorite being what my friends and I jokingly call the "Comparative Theology with Conan and Subotai" scene, where our heroes split a roast beast of some variety and discuss what gods they pray to, and why one might be better than the other. A lot about who these two are as people, and what values shape their outlooks on life, and why they get along, is laid out in very little here, and it's just pure film magic.

Fuck Joe Rogan, I want THIS podcast...

In Beastmaster, the supporting characters don't get a lot of moments like this. In fact, many are not even human until about halfway through the movie, but they make up for lost time in inventive ways. See, while Dar was growing up in the village of Emur and honing his powers in the wilderness, the story of Aruk kept right on truckin' and a few characters we meet early on make much more substantial appearances, notably from former King's bodyguard Seth, played with easy-going bad-assery by the great John Amos, otherwise known for shows like Good Times or his appearance in the Coming to America movies as the owner-operator-founder of McDowell's.

He's continued to protect what he can after escaping a royal urge with the King's son... no, the other one, a young boy named Tal.

Zed, Dar, Tal... they sure do like to keep things simple in Aruk...

"You boys aren't with the McDonald's people, are you? I don't want any trouble..."

When Dar crosses paths with them, they become fast friends, and I like to think that Amos brings a sort of nostalgia to Seth that makes that easy to believe. Dar, despite knowing nothing about his lineage, is very much made to resemble his father in a lot of scenes, and Seth seems to recognize something of the king he once swore his life to in both the young men he travels with. And Dar has one up on his father, in that whenever he gets wind of someone wanting to kill someone he cares about he ends that mother fucker. 

So with Seth and Tal basically coming in from the story that's been going on in the background of Dar's life and returning to the forefront in the manner they do, it really does a lot to evoke the 30's pulps in an important way: the heroes of such tales were not so often directly tied to the antagonists or the stakes of a particular tale- they just kind of wandered in, killed the bad men, bedded the good women, and sometimes the bad women, and then they got out of there. Next story. 

In this case, Dar happens to be directly tied to things, but that element could be removed and Dar would still be going along with the tale for reasons that are valid. There's injustice, he's the Beastmaster, he fixes that shit. And there's a pretty girl involved, this is S&S 101.

Ahh, sweet home Aruk-bama...

And that's an element of the story telling in The Beastmaster that I really enjoy: there is an episodic aspect to some of his early adventures, as we get into cool fights and get new friends, and then occasionally just wander into some weird shit, like some of my favorite monsters in any fantasy flick:
 

The Eldritch Flashers

These beasties are not really given offical names, though I've heard them called the Devourers or the Hawk-people, for reasons that become obvious when they spare Dar for being friends with a hawk, which they seem to worship.

But this whole sequence, where Dar just stumbles into their territory, faces some dark dangers, and barely escapes with his life after encountering eldritch horrors, not only feels like it could have been a Weird Tales entry with a name like "Lair of the Devourer", but is also another flourish from a horror director having an absolute ball putting creepy shit into this fantasy movie.

"Before you go, would you be interested in some literature?
We have pamphlets.."

And they even come back in the finale, feeling like if the Tall Man showed up to help save the day at the end of the Hobbit- but in way that actually isn't as tonally dissonant as that sounds.

OUTRO:"This is good... but what is best in life?"- or, So Which Film is Actually Better?

Hoo boy, here we are, I guess...

And it's a harder question to answer than I thought. See, in watching the double feature of these guys back to back, for the first time in some years, I found myself feeling what I think some of you might have guessed already from the way I've talked about them: that I was enjoying Beastmaster more...

And honestly, no one was as surprised as me with that feeling- I had always held Conan up in my mind as the A-picture and Beastmaster as the B-movie. I mean, the comparison is obvious right? 

One has what is arguably the biggest movie star of the 80s in a role that helped make him famous, before The Terminator made him a house-hold name for the rest of his life. The other has that guy from the V miniseries with the invasion of the Alien Iguana Nazis. 

One was a huge box-office success that started a boom of imitators and similar projects, that the other was unfairly lumped in with. And of course, our counterpart flopped in the box office and really only succeeded when it was re-broadcast on cable to a wider, more receptive audience, leading to the old joke that HBO stood for "Hey, Beastmaster's On!"

So why was I enjoying the b-movie more this time round?

Even Thulsa Doom can see I'm on some bullshit...

And well, I can honestly say...it's not the better movie. but it IS the better Pulp Fantasy movie.

Because sure, Conan is a film opera, a big grand, sweeping bugger that sweeps you up in it's beautiful score, and the magnetic presence of its actors- but let's be honest, isn't it also a tad pretentious?

Remember this? Thought I was done with this pic, huh?
Surprise!

Sure, in a way they are both B-movies, the sort of fantasist fare that wouldn't get taken seriously at the box office again until decades later when The Lord of the Rings would win all the Oscars for the next three years. But in so many ways, Conan through the lens of Milius has started to show his age with me. After getting shouted at in forums by so-called Conan fans about the results of the 2020 election, or seeing what looked like a Hyborian cosplayer get sent to prison after January 6th, well- I guess some of the blush was off the rose with the more right-wing talking points that Milius kind of insisted his version of Conan be about. And I remembered just the more unadulterated fun that Beastmaster had largely stayed, the one scene I already called out notwithstanding.

And like I said, Dar's adventures have curses, witches, monsters, and just...FUN. Because Marc Singer is less jacked, he's also more agile in his fights, throwing out kicks to the head and getting acrobatic where Conan is more direct and simple. And speaking of simple, the big finale's of these movies really show the fun factor on display, as the end of Conan is tightly focused and personal, but the Beastmaster?

That movie's last big set-piece is an ad-hoc army taking on the Jun horde against the backdrop of a moat of flaming tar, while Dar gets into an axe-fight with the war chief who killed his dad and eventually hurls that mother into the flaming tar by the axe that's already stuck in his back! Then monsters show up and eat the rest of the bad guys! I MEAN, CMOOON!!!

So while the case can be made that one of them is the better film, my yardstick is which one is the better fantasy film, and by that measurement, it's Beastmaster all the way.

This is just my personal opinion though, and individual mileage may vary.

I can assure all of you that I'll never stop watching either of these movies and have hugely enjoyed the experience of doing this deepest of dives into both and just swimming around in it, luxuriating in the adventures of these unique but kindred heroes, and I hope you did too.

And no I'm not doing their sequels, BYYYYYEEEEEE-

NEXT TIME:  "Y'know, back in Southeast Asia we called this kinda thing... Bad Karma..."

A Desert Island Movie GIANT-SIZE DOUBLE-FEATURE!!! Conan vs the Beastmaster!

 Welcome, everyone! (like, both of you?) to the next in the Desert Island movies series...

Today, we're gonna talk about a couple movies in a head-to-head double-length double feature of Swords, Sorcery, and... accusations of "stealing" and copy-catting? 

"Alright... which one of you did it?"

At least that's what critics at the time thought. Were they onto something? Or will Crom cast them out of Valhalla and laugh at them?

Let's find out in part 1 of this 2 part deep-dive into two of my favorite fantasy films!

INTRO: WHAT IS THE RIDDLE... OF "STEAL"?

Starting from the top, let's get one thing out of the way: I love both these movies, and anything said about either of them, even in jest, is said with a lot of respect for the artists and craftspeople involved in their creation. They've both given me literal hundreds of hours of joy, and I'm not making this article to roast either of them. They have my eternal respect.

I feel differently about their critics...

As such, I want to kick off by crushing one of the first and most pernicious movie rumors concerning The Beastmaster and Conan the Barbarian: No, Beastmaster did NOT rip-off or cash in on the popularity of Conan the Barbarian. That didn't stop a lot of critics from thinking it did, but that just proves one thing beyond a doubt: many critics have never actually been involved in the production of a film. They have no conception of how long a film takes to script, cast, scout, shoot, cut, score, and distribute. Why do I know this?

Math.

Conan the Barbarian came out on May 14th of 1982.

The Beastmaster came out August 16th... of the exact same year. 

That's less than three months. Hell, it's lucky if you can get a script everyone agrees on done in that time, but a whole film? Especially one that is quite simply as damn GOOD as Beastmaster? 

Forget about it.

Dammit Dar, EDIT FASTER! 

So just like that, BOOM, there goes one myth already. No, these films are not plagiarizing from one or the other, but were actually in production around the same time, totally unaware of each other, and on opposite sides of the world to boot! (Conan was largely filmed on location in Spain, while Beastmaster was bit more locally grown, being shot in Southern California)

But then, WHY, aside from ignorance, did so many think that it had?

Well, that one is a little simpler. 

See, they ARE really similar. Two sword-swingin' epics about muscular men in savage realms seeking revenge on the one who burned their village down? One could be forgiven for thinking someone copied another guy's homework here.

And then add on top of that, they are both trying to evoke the pulp fantasy adventure stories of Robert E. Howard and the peplum  sword-and-sandal films the likes of old Steve Reeves Hercules flicks? That's a VERY specific bag of tropes you're pulling from. And well, in a few short months, these two flicks came out and, buoyed by one another's different breeds of success, led pretty directly to the boom of S&S films in the 80s and into the 90s. 

And obviously, the same way every sci-fi film was trying to be Star Wars for about a decade there, these two set a template that absolutely WAS subsequently copy-catted and plagiarized quite a fair bit. 

So eventually, those initial reviewers crying foul became a cacophony of folks agreeing that it's not just The Beastmaster ripping off Arnold's big success- so are Deathstalker, Ator the Fighting Eagle, Sorceress, Amazon Queen, Conquest, and a few hundred other examples I could care to list off. Hell, rival body-builder Lou Ferrigno's pair of Luigi Cozzi-directed Hercules movies were trying to cash on the fantasy AND sci-fi crazes simultaneously! 

(By the way, I will cover at least the first of those beautifully wacko movies, eventually. And if you want my thoughts on my favorite of those Conan rip-offs The Barbarians take a look here, at our sister blog The B-Movie Express!)

But in the similarities between the two, we can find a lot of differences, and some fun insight into how different artists can approach what is, spiritually and in terms of content, the same tale in myriad ways. So with that, lets dive into our first category:

I: "Let me tell you of the days of High Adventure!" DIRECTORS AND TONE

Let's start by acknowledging that while the films are similar, their directors? 

Definitely are NOT...

For example, this is how John Milius chose to open up his take on Robert E. Howard's Cimmerian barbarian: with a quote from the only guy with a name harder to spell that Schwarzenegger.

"Oooh, somebody's gonna get laid in college..."

The sheer, almost guffaw-inducing, ballsiness of this move lets you know right off the bat: this Film would like, very much, to be Taken Seriously. I remember thinking as much in high school, that this was a serious, thinking man's fantasy film. I realize now that I thought that because a quote from a big, famous philosopher at the beginning of his movie about swords, revenge, and getting laid feels like exactly what a high-schooler might do. Sophmoric gives it too much credit, as it implies that perhaps it got into college.

Not to say this isn't the perfect, if in fact, the ONLY way to open up such a poe-faced and operatic take on the character as this- it totally is. But it also puts the man Milius is into perspective, along with bringing his history as a somewhat controversial figure in Hollywood into relief. See, the guy who directed Conan is also the director of the first two Dirty Harry movies, and if THAT doesn't put into perspective the whole reason that so many weird far-right nutjobs are attracted to the world of Hyboria, maybe this will: Milius is also a former board member of the NRA.

And he looks EXACTLY like you thought he would, doesn't he?

And it goes without saying that the same troubling messages of "might makes right" and "real men don't follow rules, or cry, or fuck it, even TALK if they don't feel like it" that flow through 70s copaganda like Dirty Harry are just as present, if not more so, in John Milius and Oliver Stone's take on Hyboria.

Hm? What's that? Yeah, THAT one...

Oh yes indeed, Oliver Stone wrote the first draft of this movies script. And it was apparently over four hours long and was set in the incredibly distant post-apocalyptic future and featured Conan cutting through wave after wave of wasteland mutants. So with that in mind, know how MUCH of the re-write was Milius putting his own personal brand of machismo and ideas of what being a man even IS into the setting and story. He opens with the Uber-Mensch, sure- but the symbolism doesn't stop there. See, he envisioned a three film epic, each concentrating on different themes. His second and third themes aren't important here, as those films never materialized. But his first theme? Was STRENGTH.

And SWORDS! Y'know, Phallic stuff!
....MEN!

 And as such, it opens with a montage of the forging of a sword, foreshadowing (or forge-shadowing?) how this film will tell the tale of Conan being molded into a barbarian hero, and consequently the Ideal Man. 

It's also accompanied by the rousing, beautiful score by Basil Poledouris; one that has lived on as one of the finest pieces of fantastical film scoring period, right there with more contemporary compositions like Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings score. And that music helps with the tone of the whole picture, selling that term I used earlier but will re-iterate here: OPERATIC. This film shall be Taken Seriously because this is Cinema. It is basically "Wagner: The Motion Picture"!

"KILL DA WABBIIIIIT!!!"

So no matter how closely the film hews to the style of those kind of ridiculous pulp stories of dark wizards, evil cults, giant animals, and the curses of cruel gods, we are asked to take it all Very Seriously. And the music downright demands it.

Which brings us to our other director Don Cascarelli:

Pictured on the right, posing with uh...
I dunno, his uncle or something?

Kidding aside, Don came up through the more independent, home-spun horror scene of the 70's into the 80s, making his everlasting mark on horror cinema when he kicked off the deliriously, delightfully bonkers Phantasm franchise in 1979. And while sure, Milius was ballsy, Don's movies had real big, shiny ones! And they could fly!

 And the difference in the film's openings are stark. To clarify, there are really only two 80s fantasy film intro choices: You either have raiders attacking the village, or you have the young or infant Chosen One being spirited away in the dead of night, and usually getting stowed with some kindly farmer or something. And while Conan starts with raiders, (after all that sweet, sweet sword-forging footage) Beastmaster actually has BOTH...eventually.

With the beginning scenes between a trio of Macbeth-style, prophecy-spewing witches and the scheming High Priest Maax (pronounced 'May-ax' and played with the energy of a turkey vulture by Rip Torn of MIB and Dodgeball fame), Don shows the kind of oddball sense of humor of a horror director undertaking a different genre than usual and doing so with gusto, with his take on Witches being a prime early example: all of them are played by utterly gorgeous, scantily clad swimsuit models... with the most hideous, running wax, dried-apple doll faces to top it off.

Which just goes to show that while it's still a big, grand fantasy adventure- there's a puckish sense of humor and fun to the whole thing largely absent from the deadly serious Conan. (Though the latter does have lighter moments, my favorite being the comic beat provided by Arnold's ability to just face-plant into a bowl of soup with as much conviction as he chops off heads.)

And from beginning to end, this is a fantasy adventure directed by the guy who brought you Phantasm and IT SHOWS...

Same energy in these two pictures.

Witches, prophecies, curses, monsters, and super-powers are all present throughout in a ratio that far outstrips its competition. Though, let's save who truly does what better for the end of this little head-to-head, shall we? 

Next, I want to explore:

II: WHAT'S IN A LOINCLOTH? On the Contrast of Barbarians and Beastmasters

Every story needs a protagonist, of course. But adventure stories like this one have Heroes! So in what ways are Dar the Beastmaster and Conan like?

Oh... Just a couple slabs of  USDA

PRIME

BEEF

Yes, in a move shocking no one, the heroes of these dueling classics of 80s fantasy cinema are both musclebound beefcakes who spend a decent amount of time in loin-cloths. And while one has dark hair, and the other is blonde, that is really... about where our similarities end, if we're being honest.

And even that is not as similar as it sounds, seeing as Conan is played by the legend unto himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, umpteen-time Mr. Olympia, Mr. Universe, debatably the biggest, and un-debatably the most famous body-builder of all time. Of course he's beefy. In 1982, being beefy was what literally paid the bills in the Schwarzenegger house. In point of fact, he actually had to become a bit less beefy before things could properly get going on the film, as his sword trainer noted that his arms were too thick to do everything required of him in the fight choreography. 

(Side-note: there's an amusing parallel here in the modern equivalent of an 80s S&S flick, The Witcher series on Netflix, and poor Henry Cavill being so swole the leather in his armor started to break down in the arms because it was rubbing together too much. Such are the hazards of being a burly boy.)

In comparison, Texas-raised Marc Singer is a tad wiry, though watching him from a modern vantage, there is a distinct similarity between him and the way most Marvel stars are legally required to look, and it's even noted in the director's commentary in the dvd that Marc was ahead of his time with his regimen, doing "ripping before ripping was popular" as he puts it. This gives Marc a very different profile to Arnie, making his Dar a more lean, agile hero- a big cat in juxtaposition to Conan's almost bull-like presence.

But fear not, this whole part of the article isn't about these guys physiques. Just this bit. Because muscles only make the hero on the poster, not in the film itself. As I said, the true comparison stops there. Character wise, they couldn't be more different.

Conan, in the film, is a boy in Cimmeria- a harsh mountainous realm. The son of a blacksmith, he is taught that he must one day learn "the Riddle of Steel" (which one presumes his father knows, being a blacksmith, but isn't gonna just tell him apparently), and the quest for answers in this regard informs his decisions as a character throughout. But before he can get very far at all in this, his village and his people are attacked by vicious raiders, his parents murdered before his eyes and his village burned to the ground, and himself enslaved, taken far from his home, and tied to the Wheel of Pain, where he walks in circles for many years until pushing that big sum-bitch turns him into Arnold.

The Wheel of Pain, common ancestor of all gym equipment!
All THIS can be yours for the low, low price of
your total enslavement.

And from there, his journey takes him across the world of Hyboria- becoming a brutal, pit-fighting gladiator, learning the art of the blade in the East, then finally earning his freedom and setting off on his quest to avenge his people against the folks who set him on this course, hunting high and low for them. He makes boon companions, like Subotai the archer, and Valeria the beautiful warrior and love of his life, plus he learns valuable lessons, like "Never let your guard down on a hook-up" (while nearly getting killed by a shape-shifting demoness) and What is Best in Life, which according to him (and say it with me now) is: 

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women..."

"And pushing da Wheel is good too..."

And all this leaves Dar as, if you will forgive the pun, a very different beast...

"Oh ha-fucking-ha, blogger-boy..."

Dar starts off a bit away from the humbler beginnings of Conan, in that he is royalty (though he spends a majority of the movie being unaware of it). The unborn son of King Zed of Aruk, Dar is fated to kill that guy Maax I mentioned, so Maax decides "Not if I kill you first, ya little fucker!" and tries to get his witches to do it for him after he's banished for life when Zed gets wind of what he's doing.

Using a bit of bizarre, body-horror witchcraft, the witch steals Dar by magically transporting him into the belly of an ox (don't ask me how she got a full-grown farm animal into the royal bedchamber, this movie doesn't have time for such vagaries). 

Spiriting the beast of burden away to the wilderness, she cuts it from the bleating animal, brands a literal baby with the symbol of their brutal god Ahhr, and is about to sacrifice the kid when fate intervenes.A passing farmer happens by and goes into full "What's all this bullshit?" mode and reaches for his piece (a strange hybrid of switch-blade and boomerang referred to in the film as a "kay-pah" that is right up there with the Glaive from Krull in the sheer fuckery of its powers and uses). 

I dare you to stat this in D&D...

Vanquishing the witch and saving the baby, he takes him home with no further questions asked. Just, "Hey, cool- a baby. Mine now."

 The baby grows into a boy, who turns out to have the power to speak with animals, and even bend them to his will in extreme situations (like bear attacks!), and is told by his father to keep this a secret, cuz it would really freak people out...

And eventually, Dar becomes a man, his village is burned to the ground, and who should be in charge of the raiders (in this film referred to as the Junn Horde) but old Beak-Nose himself, Maax!

And from there, you know most of the words to this song by now- he sets out for vengeance, he gains companions, goes on adventures, etc... But where this one stands out is Dar's companions, at first, are all animals: Shirok the hawk, a pair of ferrets named Kodo and Podo, and a black tiger named Rhu.

If you have a problem-
If no one else can help-
And if you can find them,
maybe you can hire-
THE A-TEAM!

Dar eventually makes human friends too, but the film sets him out clearly as an outsider first, which I have always found interesting.

So there you have two very different origins, and as such two very different heroes in the way they go about things.

It's noted with Conan, while he is rolling with Subotai, thief and archer, that the Cimmerian is "too big to be a thief". And he's not wrong as basically any time that subtlety and stealth are called for, Conan pretty monumentally fucks it up- from sneaking into a snake temple to steal a jewel, to infiltrating a Doom cult he basically botches it because he's just so damn big that somebody notices the new wall over there and goes "Where the hell did he come fr-aaaggghhh!!!" and Conan has to fix it with what's called Heavy Stealth, ie: no one can sound the alarm if they're all dead. 

AKA: Now you see me, soon you WON'T...

And in that he's second to none. Whenever he's chopping up bad guys, he's got it in the bag basically every time.

Dar, on the other hand, leans very heavily on his team dynamic- letting his animals distract bad guys while he goes in for the kill, or sometimes leading bad guys to a place where they really can't do anything BUT get killed by a giant tiger. Coupled with his kay-pah and willingness to improvise, it always makes for fun fight scenes.

Plus, when Dar needs to be stealthy? He's basically regular size, so if you put a poncho on him no one goes "Who's the giant in the poncho?" so he comes out ahead a bit there too.

Dar and Conan both have a real clever streak to them as well, using traps and unique abilities to come out on top in situations other characters simply wouldn't. Like, in one of my favorite sequences in Beastmaster, Dar is temporarily blinded by one of the witches, but uses his ability to see through his tiger friend's eyes to overcome it and kill the witch. 

And in the climactic battle of Conan, he and his buddies use their familiarity with a maze of burial mounds against the vastly superior numbers of sorcerer Thulsa Doom's minions, using guerrilla tactics and traps to ensure that two men and a very freaked-out wizard can stand against a small army of killer zealots.

And in presentation there's an interesting comparison to be made as well- Conan, as a character and as presented by John Milius, is very much an aspirational figure- in every shot that frames him as conquering against greater forces, or surviving things that would kill lesser men, even in his fumbles, Conan is presented as the Ultimate Man. And while he's hardly portrayed as utterly invincible (he does get crucified on a tree for a bit, and would have absolutely died without the help of his friends), he does also get over that in record time, ready to swing a sword and rescue princesses again after about a week or two? Maybe? And Arnold is the perfect vessel to deliver this, being so above what most people will ever look like, and channeling the stoic power of Steve Reeves as Hercules in an earlier era of Hollywood mythology. He may not have been able to act much at this point, but there is no denying the reality of Schwarzenegger in his prime being essentially a living special effect in much the same way Ferrigno was in the Incredible Hulk series of the 70s. To paraphrase, one producer of the film was quoted as saying: "If Arnold didn't already exist, we'd have to build him."

And in the same way that Milius presented Harry Callahan as a Real Man/Ultimate Cop, seeming like a throwback to an imagined earlier, more righteous age, so is his Conan framed as almost a commentary on something that we as modern humanity have lost, or are believed to have lost, and should try to regain. A sort of holy idol to the Divine Primitive. Which is another route through which I see those right-wing weirdos I mentioned creeping into Howard fandoms; because such a thing in fiction is a debatable point, but such same viewpoints in politics are some of the ur tenets of fascism.

Pictured: every one of said right-wing nuts
flexing up their typing hand to come
 at me in the comments...

Dar, as presented by a more working class film-maker like Cascarelli, feels more inspirational rather than aspiration. From his more grounded physique to his cool but not flashy superpowers, Dar has a strong Every-man quality that especially shines through in his performance from Singer. Charming, affable, but capable of giving that almost John Wayne, big Texan swagger when the role calls for it, Dar is perfect hybrid of the Western hero of the gunslinger that comes to town to solve a problem, coupled with the wandering swordsman of a Kurosawa flick and a questing knight all in one, while starting as the simple farm boy.... 

In my mind, it is no coincidence that they
cast a guy who looks like the Luke Skywalker
in the first posters for Star Wars come to life as Dar.

An outsider with a sense of justice and representing humanity in balance with nature, not exploiting it- Dar is an update on the classical ideal of the Hero, as not someone with strong values or great deeds attributed to them, but in the old world definition of what the term meant: One who was chosen by the Gods. And in a lot of ways, that could be any of us. We don't know when the world might call on us to do something incredible or even impossible- and Dar shows us that we can rise to that and use what makes us unique to help others.

SO-

Now, I suppose you see why I opted for this to be a two part article, huh? Cuz yeah, this is me at the half-way mark for my thoughts on this spiritual duology.  I've given a lot of space in this one to the heroes, so our next one, we're gonna start by giving a proper spotlight to:

THE VILLAINS!

Because only Darth Vader can make
Darth Vader look like a bitch...

Til then!