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Taramis, Queen of Shadizar (Douglas), hires Conan the Cimmerian (Schwarzenegger) to lead a quest to secure two magickal artifacts; the Heart of Ahriman and the Horn of Dagoth. According to the Scrolls (Book) of Skelos, Taramis needs these items to awaken her Cthulhu Mythos-type god Dagoth (Dagon?), the Dreaming God ("not dead but dreaming"?). In exchange for his services, Taramis promises Conan that she will magickally resurrect his lost love Valeria.
Taramis also sends her niece, the Princess Jehnna (D'Abo), on the quest because only this psychically gifted girl can touch the magickal artifacts without being killed. But Jehnna is a nubile nymphet with a royal crush on Conan, so Taramis also sends her eunuch bodyguard Bombata along to protect the girl's virginity. Conan takes along his thief pal Malak (Walter), and later recruits his old friend Akiro the Wizard (Mako), and a woman warrior named Zula (Jones) to fill out his quest team. What Conan doesn't know is that the treacherous Taramis is only keeping Jehnna a virgin in order to sacrifice her to Dagoth, and that Bombata's orders are to kill him as soon as he procures the magickal treasures.
With Jehnna's help, the big Cimmerian succeeds in stealing both the Heart of Ahriman and the Horn of Dagoth, and foils Bombata's lumbering attempts to kill him. To further frustrate Bombata's and Taramis' hidden agenda, Akiro, Conan's magickian sidekick, has also read the Book of Skelos, translating it from hieroglyphics on the walls of an ancient temple. Akiro informs his barbarian buddy that Taramis plans to sacrifice Jehnna to Dagoth, and that reawakening Dagoth the Dreaming God is probably a bad idea since it would result in "death to the world". Bombata again tries to kill Conan, then steals Jehnna back to Shadizar where she has a date with a sacrificial dagger after she places the Horn back into Dagoth's forehead. Conan now has a clue that Taramis' promise was a lie. Tired of being played for a chump, Conan returns to Shadizar with his team, where they are barely in time to save Princess Jehnna's lovely throat from the dagger of Dagoth's priest. Conan bashes Bombata and trashes Taramis by feeding her to her pet god. Then he slays the hideous Dagoth just minutes after its stormy rebirth, thus saving all life on earth in the Hyborean Age.
Conan the Destroyer was essentially a film adaptation of the Robert E. Howard story "A Witch Shall Be Born" (1934). Badly mishandled compared to the first film Conan the Barbarian (1982) directed by John Milius, Destroyer still managed to capture some of the atmosphere and elements of REH's pulp fiction tales of the Hyborean Age. Most interesting for us is the use of Howard's Book of Skelos (misnamed "Scrolls of Skelos" in Stanley Mann's screenplay). Also of interest is the name "Dagoth", which was used by Howard, not for a god but for a place: In the Conan story "The Scarlet Citadel" (1933) Dagoth Hill was the site of "pre-human ruins" where a dancing girl from Shadizar was raped by a "black demon" and – in the finest "Dunwich Horror" tradition - gave birth to the evil wizard Tsotha-lanti. The on-screen appearance of the god/monster Dagoth was similar to one of Lovecraft's Gugs – a monstrous species of subterranean giants from the Dreamlands whose jaws open vertically. Even so, Dagoth was obviously a man in a rubber suit, though veteran director of photography Jack Cardiff did his best to make the creature look huge and menacing.
As a member of the Lovecraft circle, Robert E. Howard substantially borrowed from and contributed to the Lovecraft Mythos. Howard first introduced the Book of Skelos in his 1933 tale "The Pool of the Black One". In Howard's fictional Hyborian Age, the Book of Skelos was a powerful grimoire probably written by the serpent mages of Valusia. Only three copies of the book were known to exist, and it was coveted by all magickians of that Age. As part of the "Howard Mythos", the Book of Skelos might be considered a distant relative of the Necronomicon – perhaps an ancient Hyborian ancestor of that forbidden volume.
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1998 © John Wisdom Gonce III. All rights reserved.