It is always the most innocuous movies which have the most interesting histories. I was but a young lad when this movie was released and therefore much of the kerfuffle surrounding it went over my head - indeed, movies which had anything other than Disney stamped on them were probably of very little interest to me at the time. Some years later however, Conan The Barbarian is still a name which you will hear mentioned in movie conversations and still a movie you'll find lurking in video collections alongside some of the greats. Other than being one of Arnold Schwarzennegar's first movies I didn't see that there was anything else to be interested in, as a result, it was a long time before I finally succumbed and checked out what all the fuss was about.

His original stories appeared in the magazine Weird Tales, 18 of them reaching publication and several left unfinished or unsubmitted due to his untimely demise and were only really remembered by hardcore fans until two of those fans, Howard, L. Sprague De Camp, and Lin Carter, set about reviving his work in the mid 1960s. These two were to collect together Howard's work, complete the unfinished stories and write more of their own to fill in the gaps in Conan's life, the result being a set of 12 novels which has never been out of print since.

50 years after the stories first appeared, the exploits of Conan were seen to be just the kind of material for this kind of movie. With a script co-written by Oliver Stone and set to be directed by John Milius, it looked like a certain winner too but Milius departed to work on another project(Big Wednesday) before filming started and a bunch of other names came into the mix instead. Notably the likes of Ridley Scott and Ralph Bakshi were touted as being interested in taking up the helm, but having looked at the screenplay these too were to turn down the project. The whole thing was shelved until 1981 when Milius finished his surf opus and returned to pick up where he left off...

Not the most auspicious of first meetings though, but when a character like Conan came along De Laurentiis immediately thought of Schwarzeneggar - well, he hardly had to sound like the all-American hero here now did he! Ironically, having cast Arnie in the lead role, De Laurentiis' initial fears were to prove well grounded when much of the big Austrian's speech was found to be unintelligible and cut from the movie and other parts dubbed so that audiences would at least be able to understand him - and irony upon irony, the actor they did end up casting for the role of Flash Gordon(Sam J Jones) had his entire part dubbed by another more macho sounding actor.

In 1981 filming for the movie began in earnest, most surprisingly of all being the way Milius took what would in any other director's hands have been a campy, tongue-in-cheek sword and sorcery caper and turning it instead into a very adult orientated serious endeavour. Rather than concentrating on just one of the Conan stories, Stone and Milius took elements from several, whilst managing to avoid taking too many liberties in combining these together. They were also to work solely from the author's original works, most notably taking elements from "The Thing in the Crypt", "The Elephant Tower", "Queen of the Black Coast", and "A Witch Shall Be Born.", which is to take nothing away from the sterling work put in by Sprague De Camp and Carter but instead pays homage to the original creator of Conan. The story they created is a simple one, played across three distinct acts but the execution is wonderful, if perhaps only because it is played so seriously for once.

One of Conan's undeniable weak points would of course be the acting. No one could ever even begin to deny that Arnie isn't the best actor in the world, not even today after over 20 years in the business and back then he was barely intelligible when he spoke either! Strangely though, he is pretty well utilised here, Milius not asking him to do anything outside of his range - just to flex his muscles, look good when crushing skulls and grunt a few lines of dialogue(re-dubbed later so we could actually understand them). Interestingly, Schwarzeneggar was told to model his part on that of Charlton Heston in the likes of The Greatest Story Ever Told where he plays John The Baptist...I'll leave it to you to decide whether he managed this larger than life screen presence. This would prove to be his breakthrough movie, 2 years later of course would see him starring in the blockbuster movie The Terminator, whereas previous to this he was relegated to cheesy low budget tripe.

Ultimately as well, some people may have a harm time dealing with what are quite dated looking special effects in some cases. As I said, the scenery looks good, the costumes authentic and the fantasy landscape is well presented but when it comes down to the 'money shots' its beginning to look rather lacking. Conan never had a huge budget in the first place and certain scenes probably weren't fooling anyone even back in the time it was released. I defy anyone not to be looking for the 'Made In Taiwan' tag during the fight scene with the giant snake for instance! Its certainly no Lord Of The Rings and for those who have been spoiled by the $300 million budgets of such movies his may require a suspension of disbelief far in excess of what they are capable of. If you are one of those people then think about knocking one or two stars off the final rating.