John Milius
Three 1960s California surfers fool around, drift apart and reunite years later to ride epic waves.
An American soldier who escapes the execution of his comrades by Japanese soldiers in Borneo during WWII becomes the leader of a personal empire among the headhunters in this war story told in the style of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling. The American is reluctant to rejoin the fight against the Japanese on the urging of a British commando team but conducts a war of vengeance when the Japanese attack his adopted people.
It is the mid-1980s. From out of the sky, Soviet and Cuban troops begin landing on the football field of a Colorado high school. In seconds, the paratroops have attacked the school and sent a group of teenagers fleeing into the mountains. Armed only with hunting rifles, pistols and bows and arrows, the teens struggles to survive the bitter winter and Soviet KGB patrols hunting for them.
John Milius’s jingoistic direction and pulpy screenplay fit perfectly into this film version of the Robert E. Howard fantasy story of the sword and sorcery hero, Conan the Barbarian. The story begins when a horde of rampaging warriors massacre the parents of young Conan and enslave the young child for years on The Wheel of Pain. As the sole survivor of the childhood massacre, Conan is released from slavery and taught the ancient arts of fighting. Transforming himself into a killing machine, Conan travels into the wilderness to seek vengeance on Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), the man responsible for killing his family. In the wilderness, Conan takes up with the thieves Valeria (Sandahl Bergman) and Subotai (Gerry Lopez). The group comes upon King Osric (Max Von Sydow), who wants the trio of warriors to help rescue his daughter who has joined Doom in the hills.
At the beginning of the 20th century an American woman is abducted in Morocco by Berbers. The attempts to free her range from diplomatic pressure to military intervention.