Most disappointing film releases of my life (Part 2)

I love going to the cinema even to this day. When I was a kid it was a ritual in my family that my mom would drop us off at the shopping mall with a couple of dollars each and she would drive us by the drug store on the way to the mall so that we could buy our own snacks and avoid the extremely overpriced snacks at the snack bar in the theater. I'm quite certain the staff knew we were sneaking in snacks but we were little kids.

The weekend afternoon matinees were very cheap back in the 80's and I think this was my mom's way of getting us our of her hair for 4 hours or so in order to allow her and Dad to have some alone time.

This was a big part of my childhood and I remember being extremely excited about a sequel to a film that remains one of my favorite films of all time that I still enjoy today called Conan the Barbarian.... the original, not the shitty remake from 2011.

When Conan the Destroyer was released in 1984, we were very excited to go and see this and because it was rated PG-13 it was a bit iffy if we would be allowed in so this was one of the rare times that my mother actually accompanied us into the theater to make sure the staff would sell us tickets. At that point in my life the oldest of my siblings was 14, but the rest of us were not. I was too young to remember if they were hardcore about enforcing age restrictions at that time but whatever, they let us in. I was expecting a wild ride like the first one, but man oh man was I let down.

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The fact that I was even allowed to watch the first one is one of the rare moments on my childhood that my parents allowed me and my siblings to be exposed to a rated R film but my father was a big fan of Arnold and he and my mother meticulously cut out all the sex scenes by dubbing the film on VHS and pausing it to skip all the sex scenes except for the one at the end with the orgy and well, let's just say that 8 year old me was absolutely transfixed by all those boobies.

Anyway, getting back to Destroyer. It starts out in an epic fashion as we are lead down the path of believing that we are going to see another dark masterpiece like the first film. Unfortunately, it very quickly goes down a path of almost whimsical silliness rather than blood, gore, and a more adult-oriented film like the epic first one.

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Conan once again can't take the path ahead alone and ends up being accompanied by a group of people with various skills. One of the strange additions to the cast, which I didn't realize was strange at the time was Wilt Chamberlain at Boombaata. Wilt is around 7 feet tall and although he doesn't have Arnold's physique at all, he makes Arnold look tiny next to him. Andre the Giant, although not credited, also appears in this film and there is a funny photo of them messing around between takes that shows you exactly how gigantic these two people are.

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The story takes us down a similar path as the first one and in many ways it is simply a recycled version of the first. Unfortunately, because the producers and directors decided to do two things, the film just wasn't very good.

1st off, they really wanted a PG-13 rating in order to make the film more available to younger audiences and this meant that a lot of the gruesome violence, sex, nudity, and other things that make a film fun, had to be eliminated. The censors were much more strict back in those days and the original Conan the Barbarian actually had to be toned down a bit in order to even get an "R" rating. Conan the Destroyer initially had a "PG" rating but later the year it was released (around the time that it would be available to cheap afternoon matinees, the rating had been increased to PG-13.... hence the reason behind my mother needing to come with us inside the mall.

The 2nd mistake they made was the fact that they decided to include the very basic CGI that existed at the time and while it might have seemed pretty revolutionary at the time, it just looks awful today and to some degree it did then as well.

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The combat was far less bloody and instead the entire film was more focused on being comical. Even the parts that were meant to be scary I guess were to a certain degree, weren't really. There is one scene in a floating castle of sorts where Conan has to square off against a wizard that transforms into a beast and the beast cannot be harmed by his sword. By accident he discovers that the mirrors were the only way to harm the beast and I guess that was cool and like a video game but overall, it was kind of dumb.

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Compare this to the demons attempting to take over Conan's body, or the giant snake, or even James Earl Jones transforming into a snake in the Barbarian edition, and all of this just looks cheap in comparison.

By the time we get to the final castle and Conan has to fight Andre the Giant inside of a latex suit, the audience, including me, were simply ready for it to be over.

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Even with the lighting effects and constant shift in camera angles, this entire "giant horned fish-frog" fight sequence was just awful on an epic level.

By the time the credits rolled the only thing we ended up liking about this entire thing was to be in awe of Arnold's physique and a couple of decent sword fights. The story was ridiculous, the dialogue was terrible, and some of the acting was so bad that the film was nominated for two Razzie awards, winning one of them for the girl that played Princess Jehnna.

There are many other scenes with her acting that are much worse than that but even that is pretty bad.

Another downside, as if we needed any more of them, was the soundtrack. The running music that goes from basically start to finish in Barbarian was epic, I can still hear it in my head now. All the music in this turd of a movie is extremely basic in comparison.

All in all it was just a huge letdown and audiences responded by not going to see it. After the marketing budget it might have made a small profit but nothing near the $40 million the first one made. It was such a failure that there were squabbles about the 3rd film in the trilogy that never ended up getting made as a result. It's probably for the best, especially if they were going to pursue the "PG" route again.

I have watched Conan the Barbarian dozens of times and would gladly watch it again today (I just might!) but as for Destroyer, I only went back and re-watched it once just to remind myself about how terrible it was. I think they made a huge mistake by attempting to get a wider audience by toning down the violence and sex because as it turns out, that is exactly what the audience wanted to see.