I was so uninspired by this movie I took a 3 month hiatus. It’s that Jim Belushi, you guys. He really breaks down a person’s will to blog. Let’s get into this.
Title: Red Heat
Year: 1988
Arnold’s Character: Ivan Danko, square-jawed and serious Russian cop. Pretty one-note character, pretty one-note performance. He looks great, though.
Plot synopsis: Needlessly complicated, featuring an extraneous Gina Gershon. Drug dealer in Russia kills Danko’s partner and flees to America. Danko follows to apprehend him and has to team up with “loose cannon” Art Ridzik (Belushi) in Chicago. There is a bunch of boring cat and mouse that I don’t feel like summarizing, bad guy is caught, escapes, gets shot to death on some train tracks. The end!
Quick notes:
features a young Laurence Fishburne, who also looks great
the movie opens with a bizarre scene in a Russian bathhouse that culminates in Arnold beating up the obligatory Sven-Ole Thorsem in the snow. Nearly nude.
The first words Jim Belushi utters in the movie are “funbag patrol” which is so thoroughly gross I don’t even want to discuss that sloppy charisma-vaccuum
it’s kind of fun to hear Russian spoken with an Austrian accent
this movie has three good scenes: the opening spa fight, a scene in a bar that you’ll see further down and a bus chase at the end where you see an actual train hit an actual bus. Very satisfying.
Best moment: Fake leg fakeout! Just watch:
As you may have surmised, I didn’t much care for this movie. Boring, Belushi, slightly racist throughout. There’s better movies behind us and better movies ahead. To that end:
Yay! The first real disappointment in the Schwarzenegger filmography! How exciting! I know that Stay Hungry was pretty freaking terrible, but that was a surprise because I didn’t know what I was going to see. Conan the Destroyer (like lots of other action movies) is hamstrung by a need to make itself more “family friendly” to be a financial success. Because of this, you get a movie that lacks the edge of the original while still trying to keep the same characters. So instead of getting a movie that goes all-out and provides you with all the gore, nudity and philosophy to go along with its larger than life characters, you get one that goes only half-way. For another example, see the 2011 Conan movie. This isn’t the only problem with this movie, though. We’ll get to those later. But for all its faults, it brought us this:
Title: Conan the Destroyer
Year: 1984
Tagline: The most powerful legend of all is back in a new adventure.
Arnold’s character: Don’t front like you don’t know.
Synopsis: We begin with Conan and his (ugh ugh ugh) new pal Malak beset by some whatever horse guys with nets and swords After a little skirmish, the leader of the group Queen Taramis shows Conan a vision of his dead love Valeria and heavily implies that she can bring Valeria back from the dead if Conan helps her. They go with Taramis to her city (where Conan punches what he assumes is the same camel from the first movie).
Taramis enlists Conan (and the useless, irritating Malak) to accompany her daughter on a quest to get some magic knick-knacks. Spoiler alert: she wants them for evil. There’s no real reason for Conan to go as she also sends her other warrior Bombaata (Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain) whom she enlists to both protect her daughter’s virginity (more on this later) and kill Conan after they get the knick-knacks. So Conan, Malak (gross), Bombaata and the little Princess (I call her Princess Baby because she was probably around 14 years old when this was filmed and she definitely looks it) set off to get a thing from a wizard and then another thing from some place.
First things first, they recruit their wizard friend from the first movie to join their group. Then they save Zula the warrior woman (Grace Jones, who is fantastic in this) from being executed in a village and she joins up too.
Outside of the wizard castle (which is in the middle of a lake and actually looks pretty cool), they all decide to fall asleep without posting a watch (rookie mistake) and the wizard kidnaps Princess Baby and takes her to the castle. The group finally wakes up and sees what happened and heads over to the castle. Conan ends up in a room of mirrors where he fights the Man-Ape and throws his sword through the wizard. Princess Baby gets the first thing (crystal) and they head off on their way.
The next magic thing (horn) is in an underground tomb kind of place in the desert. The Princess snatches it up and they go to leave but are waylaid by the guardians of whatever who intimate that Queen Taramis wants these items to wake an angry god. Conan’s like “whatever” and he and Wilt the Stilt fight the guys and everyone escapes into a tunnel. Malak barely helps. Bombaata collapses the tunnel behind himself and the Princess and they run away back to the city, but apparently the rest of the group is only minutes behind so the tunnel collapse didn’t accomplish that much
Back in town, Taramis drugs the Princess, Conan fights Bombaata, the Princess places the horn on a statue, Conan kills Bombaata, Zula saves the Princess from being sacrificed, the god is raised and kills the queen and then Conan kills him.
After all this fuss, Princess Baby is now Queen Baby. She appoints Zula as her Captain of the Guard and Malak as her Fool (obvs). She then tries to get Conan to stay and rule with her but gets publicly rejected. The end.
Quick notes:
Here are some reasons this movie doesn’t work
No compelling villain. The first one had Thulsa Doom and his creepy snake cult and some henchmen who Conan gets to have vengeance against. The main bad guy here is the Queen I guess, but we hardly see her. The bad wizard is barely in the movie, the Keepers of the Horn who try to stop them in the tomb are dispatched in a couple minutes, the evil god is killed quickly and Bombaata gets along with everyone until it’s time to kill Conan. In the end, this is not a movie that needed a monster and the need to cram in as much fantasy stuff (wizards, Man-Apes, cults, gods) caused it to lose focus.
There’s no reason for Conan to be a part of this quest. The Queen supposedly wants him for his thieving skills, but he mostly just does loud swordfighting and brute-force door opening.
Too much talky-talk! Barbarian was a lot more impactful by showing rather than telling. Arnold’s not quite at full acting powers by this movie, but that’s not the point. Conan is a man of action, and the audience would be better served by leaving his character being quietly charismatic.
The Malak Problem
Conan’s friend from the first movie (the sneaky archer Subotai) has been replaced by a weaselly little spaz named Malak. Despite them being noticeably different people, Malak has some of Subotai’s memories (?!) For example, he recognizes the camel that Conan punched when he was with Subotai. Confusing.
Malak is ostensibly a thief, and he is the comic relief in the movie. But he goes so far in the “comic” direction that he turns into a character who is totally incompetent, cowardly and a burden on everyone else. It is definitely possible to add humour into an action movie, this movie just goes about it all wrong. Allow me this tangent, please. In the movie Willow (love it), Madmartigan does some silly things and adds humour to the movie, but he is not a complete idiot like Malak. In Lord of the Rings, Merry and Pippin are used as occasional comic relief, but they contribute to the plot and end up becoming brave characters that shore up a cast of mostly sombre heroes. Humour can also come from just playing the characters off of each other with, you know, good writing. In the Harry Potter movies (and books, obviously) there are a lot of gently funny moments created when the main cast interacts with each other and they act in ways that real humans would.
The Princess is very young, as I mentioned before, but she is often in some uncomfortably revealing outfits. Like with many, many several movies, she is heavily sexualized for no reason. She even has some awkward scenes where she tries to flirt with Conan (gross!) and then tries to get dating advice from the half-feral Zula and she comes across as very young and innocent, but then you see most of her breasts several times. But not the whole of her breasts because, as we all know, showing people being cut in half and run through with spears is fine, but a single nip is just too much.
The use of wizard powers in this movie is much different than in the first. Where in that movie the Wizard uses arcane magic to bring Conan back from the dead, here wizards mostly use their powers to do things like open doors or divine things like that you might need to use a boat to access a castle in the middle of a lake. Also Malak uses wizard as verb. He’s the pits, you guys.
The goofs page for this movie on IMDB is really long.
Please note the delicious irony of having Wilt The Stilt Chamberlain (famed for his allegedly 20,000 unique sexual encounters) employed to guard someone’s virginity.
Some of these actors don’t even look like they’re wearing wigs, and I don’t like it.
Grace Jones is the best performance. She is giving 110%. She’s so ferocious and graceful and obviously so stunningly beautiful. Also there’s a part where she’s scared of rats and it’s cute.
Best Moment: Man-Ape, for sure.
Overall, I would say skip this one. If you want bloody, sword-swinging violence watch Braveheart or Gladiator. If you want wizards and magic watch Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or The Last Unicorn. If you want to take in a truly epic saga filled with action, adventure, drama, humour and characters you will grow to love, I heartily recommend all 6 Fast&Furious movies (soon to be 7!!!!!).
In the end, this is a Conan movie where Conan is superfluous. It’s a movie that gets a monster that doesn’t add anything (and also looks terrible). Save yourself the effort on this one.
You guys, I have so many notes. Pages and pages of notes. I’ll try to condense it for you, but I want you to get a sense for what it was like to watch this weird, sleazy, nearly plot-free “movie”. Here are some of the things I wrote in my notebook:
“I can’t even”
“All these suits”
“everyone is so greasy and creepy”
“25 minutes in, no plot yet”
“I’m so confused”
“extended hillbilly dance sequence”
“I feel like I’ve always been watching this movie”
“I feel dirty watching this”
“inexplicable” (underlined forcefully)
It’s very seventies, there’s a lot of toupees, combovers and terrible suits. Most of the time people seem to be covered in a sheen of sweat. There is an upsetting sex scene featuring a man I can only describe as a human monster. Buckle up and lower your expectations.
Title: Stay Hungry
Year: 1976
Tagline: If you’ve got an appetite for life
Arnold’s character: Joe Santo, a bodybuilder and Mr. Universe hopeful. Since he is basically playing a version of himself, he’s not bad. It’s a more relaxed and slightly more relatable character then the square-jawed action guy caricatures he plays later on in his career. Bonus: his character is actually Austrian!
Plot Synopsis: Oy. All right, the “plot”. Craig Blake (Jeff Bridges) is a rich guy with dead parents and he is sent by his sleazy, plaid-blazered realtor co-workers to buy the Olympic Gym for unclear reasons. This tiny, sleazy gym features tacky hot tub (they put herbs in the water! there’s a statue!), massage table, some weights and ladies’ karate classes. It is where we meet our other friends: Sally Field playing a trashy something-or-other (I don’t know what her job is), Freddy Kruger the grease-man (Arnold’s oil-up guy during competitions, played by Robert Englund), some other creeps and Thor, human monster and owner of the gym (R.G Armstrong)
Blake goes out to shoot pool and have a greasy bar fight with his new friends and we hear about Joe Santo (our main man, Arnold Schwarzenegger). He’s got a slew of accomplishments internationally and is now training at the gym to be Mr. Universe.
The movie chronicles Blake and Sally Field’s relationship while they live at his dead parents’ house and be trashy together. There’s all kinds of dumb scenes like when Blake steals a painting from an office building, they share a sensual reflexology session on his staircase and a waterskiing sequence. They go through a rough patch after a society party (where Sally is dressed like a straight-up video vixen in a dress that is laced up both sides to show off that she is not wearing underwear). She is too trashy to exist outside of the gym and Blake gets into a fight with his snooty friends.
Also featured in the pointless scenes: an extended scene where Arnold brings Blake to see some literal hillbillies (overalls, bare feet, jars of moonshine) play their mountain music. Arnold does an okay job of apearing to play the fiddle and Jeff Bridges does an overly-long jig. Just thought you’d want to know.
So, the sleazy realtors really want the gym so they bribe Thor with prostitutes (!!) and the movie careens into the super-upsetting Thor sex scene. Guys, I do not recommend. It’s very awful.
The Mr. Universe competition is the next day after that thing happens. Joe Santo is a finalist along with another guy who will obviously lose because Arnold has way better definition. Before the competition, Sally goes to the gym to grab something and she is attacked by an insane, barely cogent Thor. I’m not sure what happens next to poor Sally, but it can’t be good. Blake finds her there and gets her out before Thor attacks him with all his Frankenstein force. They have a crazy fight which ends in Thor flying through a plate-glass window.
Santo wins the contest and then the bodybuilders take to the streets (explanation below). The movie ends with Blake and Sally leaving town to live in a trailer with squirrels.
Best moment: The bodybuilder parade. Immediately after Santo wins Mt. Universe he runs out of the building to the gym and all of the bodybuilders run after him. This leads to some street-bodybuilding and the people go crazy for it. It’s pretty funny and everyone seems to be having a good time.
Quick notes:
Thor does wear several jumpsuits (lavender, navy, royal blue). He is either in a jumpsuit or distressingly nude. His toupee is ridiculous but I think it’s supposed to be that way because he rips it off when he attacks Sally Field with smelling salts.
Joe Santo’s accomplishments: bowls 200, Olympic swimmer, world championship curler.
The first time we see Joe Santo he is lifting weights in the gym wearing a cape and pseudo-Batman mask while a gym employee plays bongos. This is not explained for a long time.
Also, big ol’ confederate flag hanging in that gym.
There’s a scene where all the gym employees are hanging out with Blake at his mansion and everyone is sipping tiny glasses of neon green liqueur. I don’t know if this is a 70’s thing, but it looks super gross
Scatman Crothers (of The Shining fame) plays Blake’s domestic employee. He is in two short scenes, but most of the denouement is devoted to a voice-over by Jeff Bridges about how important he is.
Here’s an image: a fresh-faced Jeff Bridges floating in a pool wearing soaking wet jorts
here’s the mountain music scene, where Jeff Bridges dances, because I know you’re curious
There is a break-in at the gym where ladies’ karate is used to deter intruders! So that was fun!
The credits play over a montage of scenes from the movie. Always a mark of quality.
To wrap this up, I say watch at your own risk. There are some weird and funny parts, but it’s really long and drags like nobody’s business. The fashion is ridiculous, the southern accents are all over the map and the bodybuilders are liberally greased. But watch out for that gross Thor sex scene, because it will sneak up on you and nothing will be the same.
If you’re really interested in 70’s bodybuilding culture, you’ll definitely love next week’s flick:
I know I said “get hype’ last week, but I take it back. Stay Hungry is not something to hype yourself over. Pumping Iron, however is a really entertaining and interestiing pseudo-documentary to which I give two thumbs up!
Sewin', Drinkin', Cussin', Paintin' nails 