What happened to Subotai??
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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 -
shala1979 — 15 years ago(June 19, 2010 08:40 AM)
Agreed on everything except the point you made about the budget. Conan the Barbarian had a estimated budget of 20 million dollars and that was not a modest budget in 1982 at all. You just have to take a look at the budgets of some of the movies made around that era, like Poltergeist, The Thing, Tron, E.T , Gandhi , and even The Empire Strikes Back, a couple of years earlier to see they had very similar budgets and were considered expensive movies back then.
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MetalgearSldSnk — 15 years ago(October 02, 2010 07:02 PM)
I really loved Subotai more than I thought I would. From seeing him at the start, I kind of thought he would've been a lanky pushover for Conan to boss around. He was more than that. He easily became my favorite character. I mean he could most definitely kill Conan, but he ALLOWS for Conan to steal the spotlight. I mean his performance was awesome he was fast, smart, and he gave a couple of humorous scenes to the movie. He wasn't an over-the-top, pushover sidekick, skinny guys that is usually pared with the big brutes.
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ajnemajrje — 12 years ago(May 20, 2013 06:24 AM)
From the Conan books I have read, he did not always have the same group of people travelling with him. Subetai might have been in one or two books but not all of them as a main character.
Also the books were not written chronologically by the author. he just wrote stories as he thought them up. -
Dream_Demon — 11 years ago(July 08, 2014 02:13 PM)
The movies are just based on Robert E Howard's books but not in the same continuity. Conan from the books has a different background from Conan as portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Conan as portrayed by Jason Momoa is in a continuity separate from the other two as well.
As for Malak knowing about the camel, I simply think that the camel in this film is different from the camel from the first film and that Conan and Malak had an unseen encounter with the camel that takes place after the first film and before this film. It's the only explanation that would make sense, because how would Malak recognize a camel he never seen before and/or was described to him when it has no distinctive marks that sets it apart from other camels? He and Conan had to have met it after Subotai left Conan.
Welcome to my Nightmare- Freddy Krueger -
GreatWhiteApeofBarsoom — 11 years ago(January 15, 2015 07:23 PM)
Subtotai appears only in Conan the Barbarian(1982) and its accompanying novelization. He is not a character in the original Robert E. Howard stories. By the way, Howard wrote only one Conan novelThe Hour of the Dragonwhich never appeared in book form during his life.
Requiescat in pace, Krystle Papile. I'll always miss you.