While all you normies spent your Christmas Eve with family or watching Die Hard for the umpteenth time (great movie, no argument there), I had an itch to scratch; I wanted to see the two Conan: The Barbarian movies back to back and see which one comes on top. I didn't have much of an interest in Robert E. Howard's high adventure masculine power fantasy for most of my life, but I started getting into the whole thing when I started reading the Conan Anthology on Amazon Kindle. I'm not even half-way through the massive collection, but there is a certain charm in the straight-up high-fantasy adventure series starring a no-nonsense scantily clad beefcake slashing men, stabbing monsters and poking damsels in distress. It's material that hasn't aged well for modern social sensibilities, but it manages to titillate on a basic, very fundamental, downright bestial level.
The two movies in question are the 1982 classic "Conan: The Barbarian" starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and the 2011 flick "Conan" (later "Conan 3D" and finally retitled "Conan: The Barbarian") starring Jason Momoa. Which one is the better experience is largely subjective, but to my dismay, neither one of them is a particularly good adaptation of Robert E. Howard's creation, for different reasons.
