Conan the Barbarian (1982) from Tuna and Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Tuna's comments in yellow:

When young Conan's mother totally loses her head in an attack by a rival horde, young Conan is captured. The brilliant captors decide to affirm the Yankee work ethic by having him push a wheel for several years. They succeed in turning a frail young man into Arnold Schwarzeneger, and then they train him as a gladiator.

For the rest of the film, Arnold opens a can of whoop-ass on anyone he doesn't like. After a hard day of maiming, he plays with a ready supply of topless women. Probably the highlight of this DVD is the full length commentary by the director and Arnold.

Scoop's comments in white:

When I was a young fool in high school, only a shadow of the old fool I was yet to become, I read every one of the Conan stories by Robert E Howard, and there seemed to be about a zillion of them. I would look up all the countries he mentioned and try to figure out the modern-day equivalent. I would then try to construct a Conan chronology, putting all the stories in the correct order, like others do for Sherlock Holmes. Pretty screwy, by Krom.

Howard wrote them all for the pulps in the Pulp Fiction boom of the 20's and 30's, when Weird Tales and other pulps ruled the dreams of the boys of that generation, as comics and Mad Magazine did for the boyhoods of my generation. Howard was a friend of the famous horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft, and they admired each others' work. They were both lonely bookworms, probably with sexual identity crises, who were excessively devoted to the women that raised them. Howard was so attached to his mom that he committed suicide at her deathbed. He was 30.

The two men created their swashbucklers and all-powerful blasphemous Old Ones as a way to act out the swaggering masculine fantasies so remote from their real lives. This made them the perfect guys to create stories for the boys who read the pulps, since the readers received the same ego transferal from reading the stories that Howard and Lovecraft did from writing them.

The movie is engagingly fleshed out with some serious classical actors like James Earl Jones and Max von Sydow, who both seemed to enjoy slumming and making complete fools of themselves. Indeed, director John Milius was doing some slumming of his own. He is best known for his script for Apocalypse Now, and his love of surfing. Milius himself co-wrote the script with no less a luminary than Oliver Stone himself, speaking of slumming.

It includes an appearance from mysterious Valerie Quennessen before her unexplained disappearance. (The most reliable accounts say she is now dead, the victim of an auto accident, if I remember correctly.)