Movie Review: She is Conann

by Gary Romeo

I saw She is Conann. I traveled from Dallas to Austin to attend this premiere. It was a 3-hour drive and I hesitated to make it. But I’ve been wanting to visit the LBJ Presidential Library, so I decided a day trip to the library along with seeing the movie made for a reasonable trip. 

The library was worth the trip. Lyndon Baines Johnson was president during my formative years. There were wall displays of lots of things I remembered and things I only vaguely remembered. I can drown in nostalgia and the LBJ Library pulled me under. It was worth the trip. But what about the movie?

The Alamo Draft House is a cool place. Colorful, full-service bar with live music, and peopled with the young outsiders of Austin. I should have taken more photos, but I didn’t want to look like the out of place old man that I am. The cool thing about the Alamo Draft House are the pre-movie features. The minute I sat down the Korgath of Barbaria cartoon began. That was followed by the original trailers for Yor, Ator, Iron Warrior, Barbarians, Deathstalker, Conquest, Sorceress, Barbarian Queen, the Conan the Adventurer theme song, Red Sonja, and Conan the Destroyer. The fun ended with the clip of “Conan the Librarian” from the 1989 film, UHF.

I was starting to get my hopes up. The Alamo Draft House was prepping the film with these sword and sorcery “classics” from the 80s. I took that as a positive sign. 

I should have known better. The film was pretty much incomprehensible to me. The way I remember it, it started with a dog-faced man talking about Conann and barbarism. The movie then had a flashback to Conann as a young woman being held captive by a group of female barbarians. This segment was a little teeny bit like the young Conan scenes in the John Milius film. Her mother is beheaded, she is mistreated and toughens up. She has to fight in a vaguely pit-fighter way. She eventually poisons her tormenters and hacks them to pieces. The film has some arty shifts from black and white to color,

But then the oddness goes into fourth gear and Conann morphs into different versions of herself in the future. There is a secondary female character called Sanja, who tormented young Conann but Conann still has some attraction to her. There is a joke about Sanja being best in red. That sub-plot either disappeared as the film progressed or I forgot how it was resolved. The middle section where Conann is a black stunt driver is somewhat humorous. Rainer, the dog-faced man, is trying to seduce her and her rejection of him has a humorous line about Rainer’s German Sheperd father and mixed breed mother. He finally succeeds and Conann’s girlfriend shows up and says something like, “‘we agreed to an open relationship but NOT ANIMALS.”

The ending is even more bizarre than what went before. Conann is on top of the world and Queen Barbarian. She wants to leave her wealth to artists but wants to be a part of the art by having the artists eat her body. There is some special effects makeup turning her body parts into semi-edible looking/totally disgusting looking morsels of food. The artists eat her body to inherit her wealth. The one artist who refused to do so, comes in and shoots everyone dead.

I’m sure critics can find some meaning in all this. There are several positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I didn’t hate the film and would watch it again to try to get more from it. I think the director was actually influenced by the Milius film in a way that meant something to him. It is sort of a compliment that Robert E. Howard’s Conan by way of John Milius’s film has come to represent barbarism and that filmmakers like Robert Eggers and now, Bertrand Mandico pay homage.