A list and ranking, with light commentary
These are all the films I watched in June 2019, in the order I saw them, with the source. This list includes TV/online series, if I watched the entire series within that calendar month. Could have been a binge, could have been paced out, but has to have all been done within those 30-odd days.
The films
Game of Thrones (Season 4) (HBO GO)
Game of Thrones (Season 5) (HBO GO)
Conan The Barbarian (2011) (Netflix)
Conan The Barbarian (1982) (Digital)
RED (2010) (DVD)
Conan The Destroyer (1984) (Digital)
I Am Mother (Netflix)
Kull The Conqueror (DVD)
The best:
1st Kull The Conqueror
2nd Conan The Barbarian (1982)
3rd Conan The Barbarian (2011)
One look at the list of June’s viewing activity and it’s immediately apparent that not much happened. This is partly due to a slow work month, lots of sunshine and warm weather keeping me out of the house, a week-long trip away, and more time spent with the kids because of the school holidays.
However! I did manage to finish up Game of Thrones season 5 (having technically finished season 4 on the 1st of June), and then went Conan crazy. This was because SONY gave away Conan Exiles on PlayStation 4 in May. I played it for about an hour and realised that a) I was in love, and b) our affair was doomed if it meant playing with a controller. (I did eventually buy it on PC, and am still having epoch-shattering amounts of fun with it). But it also prompted me to have a look at the books too, and I discovered the whole world of Robert E. Howard. Being a huge fan of his friend and contemporary H. P. Lovecraft, as well as the whole genre of pulp fiction, it was a perfect fit. And it led me to re-watching the old Conan flicks, and discovering June 2019’s best picture — Kull The Conqueror!
So first of all, a bit of history. In Howard’s writing Kull (also a barbarian warrior-type dude) pre-dates Conan, both in the real world and in the literary world they both inhabit. In my early understanding, Kull is a little more thoughtful and sensitive to the potential of magic and the supernatural, whereas Conan is a more straightforward stab-it-with-a-sword kind of guy. Howard arrived at Conan after first writing about Kull, Solomon Kane (16th century puritanical-supernatural adventurer), and various historical/fantastical shorts. In essence, Conan’s world, whilst being based on Kull’s genre-defining Swords and Sorcery themes, represented an accumulation and refinement of everything that had come before, including literary criticism and publisher feedback. It was also his most mature writing, technically and thematically, from a protean, silver age of science fiction and fantasy writing.
Fast forward to the 1980s, to a classic age of genre-based cinema and one of it’s great masters, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis. De Laurentiis produced over 500 films in his career, ranging from classic Fellini and Bergman flicks to Hollywood gold such as Three Days of The Condor, Blue Velvet, Death Wish and Mike Hodges’ legendary 1980 Flash Gordon. His daughter Raffaella, also a producer of note, did the two Schwarzenegger Conan films seen on this list, the Kull film, and many others (although not the 2011 Jason Momoa Conan).
1982’s Conan The Barbarian (our 2nd-place winner this month) finally came about after the original rights holders, Lancer Books, folded up in 1966. Almost 11 years of legal wrangling ensued while the rights remained frozen, until a combination of writer L. Sprague de Camp and Glenn Lord (literary agent and Howard scholar) finally won. Together they formed Conan Properties Incorporated to handle all future Conan licensing, and awarded the film rights to producer Edward R. Pressman, who had helped with the legal battle, spending a considerable amount of money in the process.
Thanks to the 1977 success of Star Wars, Hollywood was now scrabbling for films of far-out, heroic proportions, and Conan — who was then enjoying a surge of popularity via Marvel Comics’ adaptations and Frank Frazetta’s iconic artwork — saw it as an ideal fit. Enter writer and director John Milius, one of the American New Wave who had come up with Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola et al. Millius had always had an interest in the historical and fantastical, already had considerable clout having worked on a number of seminal films, including Jaws and the first two Dirty Harry pictures, and had won an Oscar for his screenplay (with Coppola) for Apocalypse Now.
Milius approached Pressman about doing Conan with him, but they never came to a full agreement and Milius moved on. Pressman, who had been struggling a bit with financial difficulties, then had a stroke of luck when he managed to secure USD 2.5m from Paramount, on condition that a “name screenwriter” was attached. So Pressman engaged Oliver Stone to take a pass at the script, which led to it being budgeted at around USD 40m. This, of course, gave all the studios cold feet. Pressman also struggled to find a director for it, with Stone and Jaws 2 2nd Unit man Joe Alves at one point being mooted as co-directors. Ridley Scott was also approached, but waved them away to continue his post-Alien magnificence.
In the meantime, the also recently post-Alien Ron Cobb had been engaged to do production designs and visualisations, after a failed round of negotiations with Frank Frazetta himself. Cobb showed his artwork and Stone’s script to Milius, who became interested again. This was the turning point, as Milius was already contracted to do a film for Dino De Laurentiis. He suggested that Dino and Pressman co-produce, and after year-long negotiations the two reached an agreement, with Dino bringing in Universal Pictures to distribute. For their part, Universal stumped up a USD 17.5m production budget, and USD 12m for marketing and advertising.
With the ball now rolling, the crew began to expand. Other luminaries engaged on the Conan project included Peter Kuran and his Visual Concepts Engineering fx company (Raiders of The Lost Ark) for optical work. Milius himself was a firm believer in practical, in-camera effects captured using traditional techniques — Conan’s mother’s beheading, for example, was achieved with a plexiglass shield on the actresses’s neck, and a dummy head being dropped into shot. The two-man team responsible for the chopped body parts and various corpses (of which there are plenty) even included Colin Arthur, former Studio Head at Madame Tussaud’s.
But perhaps best of all, Milius recruited his friend and composer Basil Poledouris to do the score. To this day, the soundtrack for Conan The Barbarian remains one of the most highly-regarded film scores ever, not only by film fans, but by other professional musicians and composers. Indeed, there are long stretches of the film with no dialogue, where only the sound effects and Poledouris’s lush score, alternating between barbarian bombast and mystical flights of delicate fantasy, carry the action effortlessly. Conan The Barbarian is, amongst many other things, an absolute auditory feast.
Conan The Barbarian racked up a USD 130m box office on its very modest budget, so Conan The Destroyer went into production almost immediately, with a similar budget of USD 16m. Milius was not available though, so former RKO stalwart and director of Fantastic Voyage (later the inspiration for Joe Dante’s 1987 Innerspace) and sci-fi classic Soylent Green, Richard Fleischer, was brought in. Di Laurentiis had delegated his daughter Raffaella to actually produce Conan The Barbarian, and this was a role she accepted again for the sequel.
But despite the first film’s success, both Universal and Dino had felt that it could have been even more successful if it had had a lower rating. (With its violent, bloody action and scantily-clad women, Conan The Barbarian had gone out with an R (18) rating). For the sequel, the violence was toned down and the humour turned up, to create something much more like a PG-13 ‘fantasy adventure’ film. Indeed, there are lots more gags in Conan The Destroyer, both physical and verbal, but the action still retains a hard edge. Originally receiving another R, it was re-cut down to a PG (this was just before the PG-13 rating was introduced by the MPAA — the first film released as a PG-13 was, funnily enough, John Milius’s Red Dawn). Eventually, some of the cut scenes (for example, of a camel being punched in the face and horses falling over in battle) were restored for modern home media releases.
On its release on June 29th 1984 (35 years ago yesterday!) Conan The Destroyer eventually made USD 31m. Definitely not the success of the first film, but enough for De Laurentiis, Fleischer and Schwarzenegger to re-team with Brigitte Nielsen for 1985’s Red Sonja (which will be getting its own reboot in 2021) a year later. (Note that Red Sonja is a Roy Thomas Marvel creation for their Conan comics, although she was directly inspired by Robert E. Howard’s character of Red Sonya of Rogatino, from his 1934 straight-historical short story, Shadow of The Vulture). In the manner of the James Bond films’ traditional ‘Bond Will Be Back’ end-credit cards, the final scene of the film was also a direct, explicit tease for a third film, Conan The Conqueror. But proceedings now take a very X-Men-like twist, with our path to the future splitting in two…
Technically, the third film was never made. Planned for a 1987 release under either John ‘Towering Inferno’ Guillermin or Guy ‘Goldfinger’ Hamilton, production was stymied by Schwarzenegger being committed to Predator. His deal with De Laurentiis had run out following Red Sonja and 1986’s Raw Deal, and Dino was not of a mind to cut a new one with the rising star. Eventually, the whole idea petered out and the script for the third film span off into a dusty corner somewhere, never to re-emerge as a purely Schwarzenegger or De Laurentiis production.
However, re-emerge it did, finally, in 1997, as a Kevin Sorbo vehicle and re-tooled not as a Conan film, but as his spiritual predecessor, Kull! By this point, Arnold was the mega star we all know and love, and then had no interest in revisiting the past. ’90s muscle-man and Arnold-alike Kevin Sorbo, however, was now five TV-movies and three series’ deep into Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, with another three series and an animated movie to come (let alone guest spots in Xena: Warrior Princess). And despite having hundreds of TV commercials and a bevy of soap opera appearances under his belt, and being considered for both Superman in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (losing out to Dean Cain only narrowly), as well as the legendary Fox Mulder in The X-Files, he had yet to make it in the movies.
Understandably, Sorbo jumped at the chance to star in 1997’s Kull The Conqueror, which was again being led by Raffaella De Laurentiis for Universal Pictures. However, where Schwarzenegger had not wanted to reprise the role a third time, Sorbo did not want to be the replacement actor, so the character was changed from Conan to Kull. There is some irony in this, too. Sorbo-Kull’s last line in the film is “By this axe, I rule!”. This is the title of a short Kull story that was rejected by by Howard’s usual publisher, Weird Tales magazine, and re-worked by Howard into The Phoenix On The Sword, which was Conan’s first appearance!
The script for this spiritually third Conan film was actually to have been an adaptation of Howard’s novel, The Hour of The Dragon, in which an ageing Conan, by now a ruler himself, learns of a plot to depose him, involving resurrecting an ancient evil, and so on and so forth. As written by Charles Edward Pogue (who wrote the modern classic Jeff Goldblum The Fly, and would go on to write for Hercules too), this is basically how the final film turns out. Still, in a 2002 interview with IGN.com, Pogue stated that “Kull is a disaster. Both [it and Dragonheart] lost their poetry, panache, and power”, blaming studio interference and over-long development processes for their failure.
[Image Credit: Universal Pictures]
But what a failure! Kull The Conqueror fits superbly with the two OG Conans, both visually and thematically. On a similar budget as the 1987 sequel (adjusted for inflation), but with access to digital video effects and all the props, costumes and sets that nearly 10 years of fantasy TV and film-making can rent out, Kull delivers and even exceeds itself in certain areas. Importantly for a fantasy film, the special effects are excellent (particularly the transformation scene at the end, which culminates in one of the most revolting snogs ever committed to celluloid). Kull did have a proper theatrical release, and although it did not do well either critically or financially, it does still look and feel like a proper companion to the first two.
For one thing, the casting is excellent. Joining Sorbo are Tia Carrere and Edward Tudor-Pole (former British punk-rocker and Crystal Maze host) as the villains, with rich, flavourful support from Doug Henshall, Harvey Fierstein and Roy Brocksmith as a proto-Varys. The cast is rounded out by a bevy of classic British character actors, chief among whom is Pat ‘Nazi killed by the Flying Wing in Raiders and Mine Guard crushed by rollers in Temple of Doom’ Roach in his final film role. In fact, Roach is joined here by several other actors with previous convictions for swords and sorcery. Roach himself appeared in both Conan The Destroyer and Red Sonja. Swedish actor Sven Ole-Thorsen appears as the king here, was in both previous Conans, and also did uncredited stunt work in Red Sonja (as well as appearing in about 80 million other Arnold Schwarzenegger films). And Terry O’Neil, a British martial artist and actor, appears in Kull as the Ship’s captain, but was also in Conan The Destroyer and Pogue’s ill-fated Dragonheart.
One thing I particularly enjoyed about Kull, despite being initially alarmed by it’s unexpected and seemingly incongruous debut in the opening battle scene, is the use of very Maiden-like heavy metal to score the fight scenes. It gives everything a Flash Gordon feel, and feels appropriate for a film made at the tail end of an era in which buff dudes with long hair and mullets were the height of sexiness (!). Musical duties overall are handled by Joel Goldsmith, son of the legendary Jerry and composer of many years’ worth of Stargate TV music, as well as the score (with his dad) for 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact (ft. Picard’s Borg PTSD meltdown). It borrows from Basil P’s classic Conan music, and really helps cement the bridge back to the two previous films. Again, the feeling of watching Kull The Conqueror is very much one of watching a second sequel to the Schwarzeneggers, only made some time later.
Kull’s director, John Nicolella, began his career as an A.D. on several classics of 1970s’ Hollywood, working with legends such as Paul Newman, Peter Boyle and Sam Waterston, before moving on as Production Manager for Saturday Night Fever and Curse of The Pink Panther. In the 1980s, he made his mark in directing with four years’ worth of Miami Vice. All this experience getting the most out of a location and staging exciting fight scenes are put to (mostly) good effect here, and again, it has to be said that despite the film’s low profile on various modern critical aggregators, it remains a solid watch for anyone who enjoys a bit of the old swords ’n sorcery.
Finally, some of the dialogue is truly superb. Whatever damage studio meddling may have done to the script, we did ultimately get some absolutely classic exchanges, such as this one between Ascalante the warrior monk, and a very confused Kull:
Ascalante: “Your bride is over 3,000 years old!”
Kull: “She said she was 19.”
…and this familiar-sounding bit, between the brilliant Tia Carrere as Akivasha, the resurrected evil, and Thomas Ian Griffith as the disgruntled General Taligaro:
Taligaro: “That was not part of our pact!”
Akivasha: “I have altered our pact. Pray I do not alter it further”
Now then, we’re going to rewind back to the end of Conan The Destroyer to explore the second Conan The Conqueror timeline. In this one (which I will really have to condense because this whole fucking Conan story is taking waaay too long), a version of the third Arnold-Conan script, now known as King Conan: Crown of Iron, is eventually scuppered by Arnold’s election as Der Gubernator of California in 2003. Warner Bros., now holding the film rights, had spent years trying to get it moving, at various times courting the Wachowskis, John Milius (again), and Robert Rodriguez (who came closest to launching it). But all came to nought, and in 2007 the rights reverted back to what was basically Conan Properties Incorporated, who began a new round of auctions for the film. The next deal was made with Millennium Films (whose most recognisable successes were in TV distribution), with the intention of producing a series of films much closer to Robert E. Howard’s books and writings.
The script came from new screenwriting team Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer, as well as Sean Hood (perhaps best known for Cube 2: Hypercube, Halloween: Resurrection and Renny Harlin’s 2014 Hercules flick). The money — around USD 100m of it — came from Nu Image/Millennium founders Avi Lerner and Danny Dimbort. A script re-write was done around 2008 by Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain, to bring it closer to the source material and bump it up to an R/18 certificate. Various directors came and went, with Brett Ratner being famously fingered for it at the end of 2008 before furiously denying it and then storming off to make Tower Heist instead. (Interestingly, Ratner grew up in Miami Beach and was partly inspired to become a film-maker by watching Miami Vice filming around town. I wonder, then, if he ever happened to see Kull’s John Nicolella at work).
Eventually, Marcus ‘2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and 2009 Friday The 13th remake’ Nispel climbed aboard as director, and the whole thing took off. Back then, in the early 2000s, 3D was enjoying its big digital resurgence, and so the working title for the film was Conan 3D. This was later changed (thank God), to Conan The Barbarian, thus forcing film writers and amateur bloggers everywhere to add (1982) or (2011) to the title every time they wrote it. Finally released in August 2011, the Jason Momoa Conan ultimately brought home a worldwide box office of nearly USD 48m, from a final budget of USD 90m, thus qualifying it as a solid financial bomb. Critic and audience responses were somewhat more mixed though, and despite the stupid numbers websites giving it very low scores, if you do any reading about the film you’ll find a more even-handed response from reviewers.
Anyway, it’s number three on my list of June’s best films, so it can’t be all that bad, right? (Don’t answer that). I think that, first of all, the odds are/were slightly stacked against it. As with nearly all reboots or remakes of things that are generally acknowledged to be ‘classic’ somehow, they’re immediately drinking from a poisoned chalice. Second of all, I think that with the passage of enough time, the film will be looked upon as favourably as the original two are now. On it’s own, it does present the most realistic, gritty, believable-looking and feeling depiction of Conan and his world yet. (Do NOT tell those salty buggers on the Robert E. Howard subreddit I said that, or I will have hell to pay). This is largely due to the quality of the effects work, which is of course able to digitally alter landscapes and sets into much more fabulous-looking places than just Croatia or Slovakia alone can provide (as fabulous as they are, and I can testify to that from experience).
This alone does wonders for immersion, as does the digital gore (mostly, but not always), and Jason Momoa’s pecs. Seriously, that dude is ripped. He’s the Arnold of the 2000s, but somehow even leaner and more ripped-looking with it. Arnold is a bigger man I think, with more mass, but Momo seems somehow denser. Anyway *wipes brow*, Stephen Lang does a fantastic villain in this, and is the first truly worthy successor to James Earl Vader’s Thulsa Doom. He’s brilliantly supported by Rose McGowan as his evil, incestuous daughter. On Conan’s side, Rachel Nichols does a great warrior monk, and Morgan Freeman does the now-traditional opening and closing narration, a job formerly held by the OG Conan films’ Mako, in the dual role of wizard sidekick and narrator.
But despite the overall freshness that digital and 90 million modern dollars brings, the film still borrows heavily from its predecessors in terms of its look and feel. The story begins in the same way too, detailing Conan’s birth in the midst of an attack on his village (although 2011’s does his birth in one of the most hair-raising ways I’ve ever seen — seriously, prepare yourself for those first few minutes!), before detailing his first footsteps in the ways of the warrior. Best of all, in the new version we get about 20 minutes of Ron Perlman as his old man. Also congruent with the old films, as well as the original stories, is Conan’s early adventuring days as a pirate. In fact, his best friend in the film is the pirate captain Artus, played by Game of Thrones alum Nonso Anozie. And it has to be said, he plays it beautifully, absolutely smashing it as the kind of jolly, dangerous, dependable friend that Harvey Fierstein hinted at in Kull.
In total, I have to give June’s third-place film, the ‘new’ Conan, much respect and credit, and I suggest that you hunt it down (it’s on Netflix too) and have a good night in with an old friend.
Honourable Mention
Honourable mention this month goes to Season 5 of Game of Thrones for just being superb all around, and finally giving Cersei what she deserves. Not much to say here, because if you watched the show you’ll be happy to see it here, and if not, you won’t care either way. (But do watch it, it’s really excellent).
The worst
Oh boy. Well, I had a feeling about this when my dear friend and partner in movie-and-show-watching crime, Disco Pete, said ‘Thanks for telling me about that new Netflix thing, it was really good!’. Not because he has bad taste — on the contrary, he has superb taste, and has turned me on to many of my most favourite new films and shows. (Pete, I salute you buddy!). No, it’s because on certain specific things we have polar opposite opinions, and I know by now when something is going to divide us.
I Am Mother’s greatest single failing is that it is about 45 minutes of story stretched out into 115 minutes of film. It’s a classic case of a great idea spread too thin to make it sustainable over its own runtime. 50 to even 20 years ago, this would have been a much-lauded episode of an anthology series. A Twilight Zone, or a Tales From The Crypt, or an Outer Limits. It could have thrived over time and earned a reputation as a great, intriguing story. Instead, it’s one of the poorer Netflix genre offerings. Which is totally unfair, because there is nothing wrong with the cast (Clara Rugaard, Hillary Swank, Rose Byrne’s voice and a WETA dude in a robot suit), or the story on their own.
Again, the main problem is that it pads out the running time with long, moody shots of its uniformly grey, boring sets in the now-standard arthouse Sci-Fi style, and long, hesitant pauses as its pre-teen heroine and necessarily anodyne robot character puzzle at each other over a tenuous mystery. Long stretches without dialogue that do not clearly telegraph their intentions with either sound or action don’t help either. (Cf. the first Conan, which knew how to do the silent movie treatment effectively). The ‘thriller’ part of the plot is mainly conveyed by the young heroine looking tense and nervous as she discreetly does all the things she knows her potentially killer robot ‘mother’ will disapprove of, which is too much like my own childhood to be entertaining. I also see a nervous twelve-year-old trying to quietly escape every day, so this wasn’t the Sci-Fi fun I had hoped it would be.
If I sound like I’m being overly harsh, I probably am. Again, it’s mostly a case of the cheese stretching too far from the pizza to be tasty, and the fact that dodgy robots in high-tech underground bunkers necessitate an aesthetic that eschews warmth and heart, visually and tonally. Go on and give it a go anyway — be like Disco Pete, not Barbarian Guy!
Barbarian Bonus
Let’s end this ridiculously long trawl through loincloth history with a look at the living goddess, Lucy Lawless, as Xena, Warrior Princess!
