What happened to Subotai??
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magic8ball2112 — 12 years ago(September 26, 2013 10:03 AM)
Sounds about right.
Could've been worse, if you think about it. They could've brought in the actor who played Malak AS Subotai, yet have him portray Subotai in no way like the original. Kind of like what happened when Kirstie Ally was replaced in
Star Trek III
. She wanted too much to come back. So they canned her & in comes Robin Curtis as a wooden, cold-Vulcan version of Kirstie's Saavik character. -
Xeokym — 15 years ago(June 06, 2010 07:10 AM)
Yeah except he came before Ren & Stimpy, so, they ripped HIM off. Actually, they ripped off Peter Lorre.
I could never figure out why the hell they tried to make it seem like Malak was supposed to BE Subotai. I just assumed he was a different guy, and then he makes the comment about the camel, and I was like, WHAAA?
What sucks even more is that at the end of this movie, they make it sound like there might be other adventures, and they never did anymore.
There sure was potentialI wonder why they never did another Conan? It's not like there wasn't enough material (books) to base another movie on!! Oh well.
"Questions are a danger to you, and a burden to others." -Mr. Krabs -
dm3588 — 14 years ago(May 20, 2011 08:45 PM)
What sucks even more is that at the end of this movie, they make it sound like there might be other adventures, and they never did anymore. There sure was potentialI wonder why they never did another Conan? It's not like there wasn't enough material (books) to base another movie on!! Oh well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
They planned a third one, but Arnold was committed to
Predator
, and his contract had expired anyway. The movie went to Development Hell, and eventually got turned into
Kull the Conquerer
.
Cross my heart, smack me dead, stick a lobster on my head. -
Gareth-6 — 19 years ago(August 01, 2006 01:15 PM)
I think with a director like Richard Fleischer who also directed Red Sonja and tried vainly to add comic relief to a show that, and like Conan the destroyer, did not need it. Had Subotai's roll been kept in Conan the Destroyer and Falcon and the little brat prince in Red Sonja not been thrown in for laughs they might have been as good as the original Conan.
Just my 2 cents. Thanks -
rjobrien_1943 — 19 years ago(October 22, 2006 09:57 AM)
Gerry Lopez was a friend of John Milius, the director and co-writer of the first CONAN. I think Lopez made his film debut in Milius's 'Big Wednesday' (1978). Milius didn't get on with CONAN's executive producer, Dino De Laurentiis, and was never a contender to direct the sequel. Maybe Lopez didn't want to be involved without Milius. Alternatively, as suggested above, the producers of DESTROYER didn't offer him a good deal. Either way, the script for the sequel acts like Subotai never existed. I guess the writer felt any sidekick would do.
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boowallace — 17 years ago(May 29, 2008 08:04 AM)
Yeah, I've always wondered how Malack knows about the camel and even more the wizard, Akiro. Did they all have a sitdown lunch together and talk about the old times before there ever was Malack just to clue in Malack ?
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TheBucklandFirm — 16 years ago(May 11, 2009 06:08 AM)
i watched this bag of beep yesterday. there's so much wrong with it but i'm glad to see on here that everybody seems to think subotai was really missed. he was such a cool character. there's not much i liked about the sequel. i thought bombaata was cool but that's just coz it's wilt chamberlain! too many monsters and too much comedy for my liking!
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Koosh_King01 — 16 years ago(March 08, 2010 09:01 AM)
I liked Malak, and I seem to be alone in that. I just like Tracey Walter in general. That said, I also liked Subotai. It would've been interesting to have both of them in the same movie, and have Malak constantly annoying Subotai.
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Adec — 15 years ago(June 14, 2010 07:59 AM)
Gerry Lopez didn't want to return without John Milius directing, as he never really wanted to be an actor anyway, and just played the role as a favour to John Milius in the first place. And John Milius was never going to be making the sequel as Dino De Laurentiis didn't like him, and thought he spent too much money on the first film and made it too violent. So no John, no Gerry. Personally, I think Gerry Lopez was probably better off in the long term
And as much as I love Tracey Walter as an actor, who was at the time on a real hot streak with truly great performances in great films like Repo Man just before this one, and At Close Range made soon after, he was simply miscast here, and given a pretty crappy character to play to boot. Actually I think he does the best he can with the role, but the fault lies in the character and the way it is written, and Fleisher and De Laurentiis' desire for cheap 'comic relief' more than anything else. I'd also say that Tracey Walter's voice, much like Maryam D'Abo's, just doesn't seem to fit this kind of a world, and they both stick out like sore thumbs in the film a bit because of that.
As for Conan the Destroyer, overall it's not a horrible film, and it is nowhere near as bad as some make out, but it is just so damn underwhelming after the grandness that was Conan the Barbarian that it looks twice as bad by comparison. And again much of the reason for that is that it just looks so damn cheapand it looks that way because it was. Conan the Barbarian made just shy of 70 million dollars worldwide in 1982, on a very modest budget. And yet look at how far they made that modest budget go. The film looks far more expensive than it actually was, and still holds up to this day. De Laurentiis' reaction to his surprise hit? Sack the director/co-writer, give the sequel an overall budget that wasn't even half of the budget that the first film had, and hire Fleisher who he knew could shoot quickly and cheaply, even if the man wasn't particularly suited to the material here.
Ever wonder why Basil Poledouris used so much of the original Conan music again in Conan the Destroyer? It was because he was only paid enough to write one new main theme for the film, and was asked to mainly re-use all of his old Conan cues as much as possible to keep any additional costs in so far as recording new music to an absolute minimum. That's how cheap De Laurentiis could be, and how little he recognises actual talent, and the worth of using it.
I mean there was actually some good ideas here, despite the liberal borrowing and arbitrary changing of R.E. Howard character names and plot elements, I mean the sequence with Toth-Amon and the Man-Ape could have been a highlight of the film, if they had spent the money and time on an actual quality actor rather than using stuntman Pat Roach for the wizard role, and coughed up the cash for better make up effects and put in the effort to actually shoot the scene well, and without silly crap like spinning Conan by his feet, but instead it's a poorly shot fight against a guy who looks exactly like what he is, a guy in a cheap rubber mask. But the concept and the ideas on how to defeat his enemy are there, they were just poorly realised, as is the case of most of this film.
Make no mistake, this sequel was destroyed by De Laurentiis and his cheapness and his greed, more than anything else. If he had paid the money to return the original team who made Conan the Barbarian, all of whom have since said that wanted to come back to make a second film, then we could have gotten another great film, and perhaps then Schwarzenegger wouldn't have dropped the character like a hot potato as soon as his three picture deal with De Laurentiis was up (which he did by making this and Red Sonja back to back, just to get out from under De Laurentiis' thumb as soon as he could, though DEG did later distribute Raw Deal as well). But alas De Laurentiis saw this film as nothing more than a quick cash in sequel, and so we got what we got. Hell, we're probably lucky that it's as watchable as it is. And at least they spent a few dollars on Dagoth for a suitable finale.
Ahhh, what could have been Still, it is what it is. Maybe we should just be thankful that Milius was a strong enough personality not to buckle under the De Laurentiis pressure machine too much on the originl film, or else that film might not have turned out as good as it did either, had old Dino gotten more of his way