Swords, sorcery, a snake cult, and (a few) scantily clad women. It’s Arnie Schwarzenegger’s first big action movie and he says about nine, ten words in its entire two-hour-plus running time. His mullet is more expressive. Director John Milius prefers to let Conan’s sword do the talking while the loud orchestral score by Basil Poledouris pounds with the force of someone bashing in your face with a Viking shield.
Conan starts off here as a little kid who sees his parents massacred by James Earl Jones. About twenty years go by and a grown up Conan gets together with blonde warrior woman Sandahl Bergman and scrawny thief Gerry Lopez to seek sword-swinging, blood-splattering, head-chopping, R-rated revenge. Along the way, he kills a vulture with his TEETH, disguises himself as a priest, and pokes Sandahl Bergman by firelight every night with his OTHER sword.
Based on Robert E. Howard’s pulp novels, this is slow-moving and it hasn’t aged well, but it was a major international hit in its day and inspired about 7,000 imitation loincloth epics of varying budgets through the 1980s.