"I suppose nothing hurts you." "Only pain."

One of our RPG group has recently been going gaga over dinosaurs with the release of Ultimate Magic by Paizo Publishing. One of the class variants listed in it is the Saurian Druid and she's just crazy excited about it. To help her scratch the itch for that class I've been trying to think up some kind of setting that I could throw them all into where dinosaurs would make sense but I've been having a hard time finding something that fit the bill. To try to get some inspiration, I decided to bust out the popcorn and hit NetFlix streaming for some old fashioned sword and sorcery adventure.

The Conan movies and stories are something that I just never got into when I was younger. I liked fantasy as a setting but just never thought about even taking a look at the works of Robert E. Howard until recently. Since I had some time to kill and no book to read I went with the next best thing which was the old Conan movies with Arnold. Unfortunately the original is not available for streaming so I went with the next best thing, Conan the Destroyer.

I must admit that I went into the movie with pretty low expectations. As I recall this was one of Arnold first movies so I wasn't expecting any fantastic dialogue and being made in the early 80's... well like I said; low expectations. As it turned out, I was pleasantly surprised when I was proven wrong.

I'm not saying that this is some award winning movie but I definitely think that it worth taking a look at. The acting was much better than I was expecting and it was pretty entertaining overall. Even the special effects were better than I expected especially considering when it was done. The story is kind of predictable but even so it was fun to watch it play out.

One of the things that I found really interesting was actually the climactic battle at the end of the movie. Near as I can tell there this story is not drawn from the Robert E. Howard original works but there was a definite Lovecraftian overtones to it. Given that Howard and Lovecraft actually corresponded with each other quite a bit it makes me wonder if this feel was something that the script writers actually drew from the novels or if this was just something they wanted to put in. Might be time to hit the library to do a little "research"...

But I digress. If you are looking for some sword and sorcery mayhem on the big screen I'd definitely recommend checking this movie out. I've heard the original is better but I still think this one is worth watching.