Yeah, see, Conan is better than all of those.
Willow, while a decent flick for having so many midgets, is a bit...saccharine. Good, but it felt really contrived.
Labyrinth, while weird as fuck and has cool sets, has David Bowie in spandex kidnapping kids. Again, not bad, but a little sketchy.
Dark Crystal, while totally awesome on acid, is a little difficult to make sense out of sober. Really good, but leaves important story details out (where did those stilt-things come from?).
Clash of the Titans is Clash of the Titans. I think that's more of the kind of sword and sorcery flick that Alex is talking about.
Conan, on the other hand, every shot and frame is an ideal depiction of some aspect of high fantasy. Crucified on the Tree of Woe == our hero's greatest struggle is with himself and the birds. Inspecting the tomb == a discovery of some place so ancient and secret that to speak would be the worst sin. I'm not saying it was intentionally as good as it was, or sophisticated. I just see it as the best possible combination of fantasy...tropes, if you will. I don't even like fantasy all that much. Outside of the ones Aurjay mentioned (haven't seen Legend), a handful of modern ones (Lord of the Rings is kind of close to this idealized fantasy, but Jackson needs to stop using slo-mo so much, and the Elven was hard to swallow), and this one I don't recall but it involved a kid with a book who went to a fantasy land (not The Pagemaster, it wasn't animated) and there were fish with razors on their backs at some point, most of it is pretty bad.
I will posit that perhaps Aurjay is mistakenly thinking of Conan the Destroyer, because that was god-fucking-awful.
Four new posts: yeah, Alexander was pretty stinky.
Also, completely agree with Alex. Arnie is not an actor, he is kind of just a force of nature type of person (or he was back then). Which is what Conan was. He only says five lines to his love interest in the entire movie, when they first met while both were robbing the tower. Not when he was revived, and certainly not while they were having sex. He has maybe 100 lines in the entire movie. All of his costars were developing his character for him.
Edit: crap it's late. I'll get back to this tomorrow.