Conan the Barbarian

Conan the Barbarian (1982) is John Milius's sword-and-sorcery epic you can watch online on iFILM. As a boy, Conan watches the warlord sorcerer Thulsa Doom slaughter his village and behead his mother. The child is chained to the Wheel of Pain and ground down by years of slavery.

Out of that broken prisoner grows a wall of muscle and steel. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the role that made him a star, fights through slave pits, gladiator arenas and wastelands with a single aim: track down Thulsa Doom and settle the debt. Along the way he joins the thief Valeria and the archer Subotai, while Doom's serpent cult — led by James Earl Jones — waits at the end of the road. Max von Sydow plays King Osric, whose daughter has run off to the cult.

Milius and co-writer Oliver Stone reshaped Robert E. Howard's pulp stories into a grim saga of vengeance where the talk is sparse and the violence is real. Basil Poledouris's thunderous orchestral score pounds over every clash and has long outlived the film as a genre landmark. Stream Conan the Barbarian (1982) online on iFILM.