Conquest

Sword and sorcery tale of two powerful hunters from a future World trapped in prehistoric times , confronting a nasty witch : Sabrina Siani bent on taking the fantastic bow for evil . In a place beyond time, comes a terrifying challenge beyond imagination .At the beginning a young hunk , Andrea Occhipinti, with a magic bow sets out into searching for a villain sorceress . On his trip he meets another mighty warrior : George Rivero , and both of whom join forces to battle horrible creatures , creepy zombies , weird apes and anything else. He is the only hope for a dying race , he is the beginning which will destroy all but the boldest warrior !.

A nice sword and sorcery tale about a terrifying odyssey into the unreal , featuring brutality , strange production design , ethereal ambience by means of a foggy photography and attractive musical score. A camp fun with fights , violent confrontation , lots of blood and gore , beheading and somewhat silly finale . Being a Spain/Italy/Mexico coproduction , here appears Italian actors : Andrea Occhipinti , Gioia Sscola , Sabrina Siani , Spanish : Conrado San Martín, Violeta Cela, Jose Gras and Mexican player : Jorge Rivero . Special mention for the dark but colorful and foggy cinematography by cameraman Alejandro Ulloa who used peculiar filters , soft focus as well as a fog machine . This splendid cinematographer Alejandro Ulloa had a long international career including films as House of Garibaldi Street , Manaos , The Amazons , California , Pancho Villa and Horror Express . A rare but very atmospheric musical score composed by Claudio Simonetti by means of synthesizer , he is the composer of the soundtrack of several Dario Argento's pics , besides being a music composer and keyboard player of the Italian rock bands Goblin and Daemonia.

The motion picture was uneven but professionally directed by Lucio Fulci in his usual style , including some regular tics and ordinary marks. Fulci was deemed to be the godfather of the gore , making decent films as Zombie Flesh Eaters or Zombie 2 , City of the Living Dead , The Beyond , The House by the cemetery , The Black Cat, New York Ripper and many others .

Adults deserve to have their fairy tales & fantasies too, and I'd say Lucio Fulci cooked up a pretty potent adult pulp fairy tale here. I'll leave it to others to describe the plot: My first indication that this wasn't going to be your average CONAN ripoff when the four guys dressed up like Smokey the Bear rip a cave girl babe into quarters, snort drugs with a nude sorceress witch babe with a body from hell who then copulates (R-Rated style) with her companion python while having a vision of someone shooting her with TRON's bow & arrow. Talk about weird!

The film is an interesting combination of opposites that aims right at the atavistic, adventure-loving 14 year old with a desire to see bared breasts in all of us. While the narrative is somewhat confusing in your typical Fulcian kind of way the visuals are just as striking, with costume design by Mad Max and Larry Flynt, including oddball touches such as the Dog Men, the Gauze Men, Ape Guys and that far-out sorceress. She really is the focus of the film: The two guys out gallivanting around saving each other from imminent doom are more sort of there to give the film an excuse to have such an outrageously sexy harlot as it's force of evil, complete with a bestial contingent of half men half animals to do her evil bidding.

But seriously, if you go into this expecting anything other than complete dreck the movie *WILL* annoy you. For fans of be-headings, clever escapes, back-flips, fights to the death, mystical snake babes, ferocious howler guys, Atari era computer graphics, ridiculous cornball dialog and equal amounts of beefcake and cheesecake, this movie should be your priority rental next time you're in the mood for something other than a Global Warming movie. CONQUEST may not change the world, win any elections or even be that good, but I'd rather be confused by something that knows it's garbage & has fun with the idea than snookered by ideology disguised as entertainment.

7/10, even if it doesn't make much sense ...

"Conquest" is a typical case of a "love it or hate it" movie. The crossover which Fulci tried was: take some of the barbarian hero stuff popular in the 80s (Conan, Beastmaster), combine it with the splatter horror the director is well known for, and give this a psychedelic edge with blurred, constantly foggy visuals and haunting synthesizer music. Surely not everybody's taste, not even for many fans of Fulci's other works. However, if you are in the right mood, "Conquest" is an experience that compares to no other fantasy horror movie...except maybe Bava's "Ercole al centro della terra"! The story can be given in a few lines: Ilias, a young man from a comparatively civilized country, travels to a barbarian land of many terrors. He meets the warrior Mace, and together they fight an evil sorceress who claims to be responsible for the rising of the sun, and is worshiped like a goddess by everyone who believes her (surprisingly many).

Fulci doesn't give any explanations, but lets us dive in head first. Don't ask "why do those zombies exist in the swamp?", "why does Zora appear out of thin air?" or "how can Sabrina Siani be beamed from the mountain top into the cave without Scotty around?". This is not the point. What Fulci shows us is a dream where everything is possible. Meet the creatures that lurk in your nightmares, and when there are no more arrows for the bow, it shoots lightning beams. A dream does not require logic. Even death is not certain here. I perfectly understand when people don't like this movie, because it is opposed to what one normally expects from a movie. However, I don't see this as a dumb or sloppy script - to me it appears to be a purposeful experiment that did not succeed entirely, but is unusual and challenging. As I said at the beginning: love it or hate it.

......A bit of an incoherent mess sadly. Still, with Lucio Fulci at the helm, what more could you expect? Yes, this is fairly typical of our Lucio's output; Beautiful to look at, with some outstanding, dreamlike imagery but as regards the actual substance, well, let's just say that it's muddled to say the very least. To be equitable, whilst the whole is somewhat of a bore to sit through, there are a number of well handled sequences which regular Fulci fans will delight to, such as one scene which is pleasantly reminiscent of the director's infamous zombie output, here featuring subterranean 'zombie' like creatures which slowly rise from a misty lake and amble menacingly towards one of our heroes.

True to Fulci form, there's the usual gore quotient including such wondrous sights as a woman torn in two down the middle(!), a magic arrow exploding through a woman's chest, a number of gooey head smashings and last but not least, some particularly off putting, pus oozing boils!

Without giving too much away, I must admit that I was taken by surprise by the fate of a main character quite late in proceedings - good old Lucio, he certainly doesn't mind sacrificing a main protagonist for the hell of it!

Overall, whilst gore fans will no doubt derive a kick from some of the films icky moments, there really isn't much else to recommend this on. Certainly, this is sadly far from Fulci's best work.

In an unnamed pre-historic land, a gold-masked sorceress named Ocron (Sabrina Siani) rules all evil. A young archer (Andrea Occhipinti), equipped with a magic bow-and-arrow, sets out to kill her, teaming up with a hardened, animal-loving muscleman (George Rivero) along the way...

This was the first movie Fulci made after breaking his assocation with Fabrizio De Angelis, and is recognised as the one that would stop his career in its tracks. Fulci's quarrels with producer Giovanni De Clemente really show through on screen, with some particularly cheap special-effects and mangy-looking monsters.

To his credit, Fulci tries hard to work up an atmosphere (orange skies, fog, green mossy plains), but gives up towards the end. Some scenes are just plain stupid, such as the wolfmen attacks (they look like Dulux hounds!) and Rivero rescued from drowning by dolphins. As with his earlier CHALLENGE TO WHITE FANG, the sheer nastiness of what goes on weighs against the fantastical, magical backdrop Fulci was trying to create. But FANG had lovely locations, good acting, a pacey storyline and excellent photography to fall back on.

Gore fans do get their money's worth, however. An old man's brain is exposed after receiving a cranial axe-blow, Ocron whacking open a severed head to feast on its brains, various gore-spewing arrow hits, zombies being staked, several graphic burnings, and Ocron's heart blown out after receiving a laser-bolt to her chest. Not forgetting the notorious 'wishbone' sequence, where a naked girl is spread-eagled until she splits right up the middle.

Of course, many video-releases are cut, including the UK and Dutch tapes. Go for the Belgian or Greek release, they're both uncut and LBXed. That is, of course, if you care!

It's not surprising that the Italian spate of CONAN rip-offs only lasted about a year. This unimaginative effort, which is adequate at best, is actually one of the BETTER rip-offs. You don't even want to know what Lenzi's IRON MASTER and Tonino Ricci's THOR THE CONQUEROR are like!