The new director was Richard Fleischer. Fleischer had made some great genre films – Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Fantastic Voyage (1966) – but by the 1980s was working as a glorified B-movie hack, turning out efforts like this, Amityville 3D (1983) and the subsequent Robert E. Howard adaptation Red Sonja (1985), all for Dino de Laurentiis. On script, Milius and Stone have been replaced by Stanley Mann, author of The Collector (1965) and Eye of the Needle (1981) and more tellingly of the likes of Damien: Omen II (1978) and Meteor (1979). More promisingly, there is a story from Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas – Thomas had written a number of issues of Marvel’s various Conan comic-books in the 1970s and Conway had worked on Marvel’s adaptations of Robert E. Howard’s King Kull character. Unfortunately, in employing comic-book writers and then handing the screenplay over to a hack like Stanley Mann what has resulted is a story that turns Conan into well ... a comic-book character. The story is only a pedestrian reshuffling of typical genre trappings – witches, demons etc – that feels like a Dungeons and Dragons adventure with the cast merely moving in a straight-line from one encounter to the next.

Moreover, despite what the film’s vandalistic title suggests, this is a severely watered down Conan. All the primal violence of John Milius’s vision in the first film has been replaced by a two-dimensional comic-book tone. Indeed, Conan the Destroyer received a PG rather than an R-rating like the original. All the primality and brutality that essentially is Conan has been sacrificed. In Arnold Schwarenegger’s performance, which had yet to develop the tongue-in-cheek audience rapport it would with later action film stardom, Conan is a dumb brute whose intelligence seems down around the single-digit level. The rest of the characters fare little better – there are some awfully mawkish scenes regarding the princess’s sexual awakening and infatuation with Conan. Both Tracey Walter and Mako give embarrassing performances. The one good aspect of the film is the presence of singer Grace Jones in one of the handful of film appearances she made in the mid-80s. Grace Jones is not a particularly good actress but whenever she is on screen projects a raw savagery – she is like a wild animal that needs to be caged. Although the filmmakers, as though seemingly somewhat daunted by such a strong female presence, have to dumb her down with a sexist scene where she screams at the sight of a mouse.

After Conan the Destroyer, a third Conan film was toyed with for a number of years, before eventually emerging as the dismal Conan the Barbarian (2011) starring Jason Momoa. Other Conan works include Conan the Adventurer (1992) and Conan and the Young Warriors (1994), two animated tv series that reduced Conan to a teenage adventurer; and a terrible short-lived live-action German-made tv series Conan (1998), where Conan was played by dull muscle-builder Ralph Moeller.