Conquest

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!

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 ...

......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.

If there's any movie Lucio Fulci made that inspires equal love and hatred, it must be this, the director's lone fore into the Sword and Sorcery subgenre. The general opinion of its detractors seems to be that "Conquest" marked the beginning of Fulci's descent into both commercial and artistic mediocrity, and while the former may be true, I'm not understanding the latter. In light of what Fulci's work aspires to be, "Conquest" can in many ways be seen as a culmination of his style, and if your best criticisms of the movie are that it's "plotless and cheap," I wonder why you're watching a Fulci movie in the first place.

Sure, the plot is a rudimentary blob that in the end amounts mostly to characters wandering back and forth as an excuse to get them into perilous situations involving traps and monsters, but Fulci's visual sensibilities are positively ON FIRE here, so much so that the limitations of the story become pretty much inconsequential. They take a back seat to the otherwordly mythic fantasy environment that Fulci is able to create with the most frugal materials. It is the foreboding fog-shrouded swamps, ancient stone temples, grotesque creatures and lurid-colored alien skies that will linger in the mind as the work of an artist who clearly has an eye for distinctive visuals. You could only accuse this of being a movie derivative of "Conan the Barbarian" if you completely ignored this aspect of it, because I can't think of another film that looks anything like this.

Other aspects of "Conquest" work to its advantage in subtle ways. The spare, monosyllabic dialogue helps to create the sense of a primitive and brutish world and the minimalist pulses of Claudio Simonetti's electronic score mesh well with the stunning visuals. Bizarre details - the villainess' gold mask and fascination with snakes, the enchanted bow that glows blue, the dolphin rescue - border on the surrealistic. The effect achieved, at least to this viewer, is hypnotic. I find myself wondering how so many filmmakers today, when they are given all the resources in the world and can't give us one interesting thing to look at, can be treated so leniently by critics who would jump on the bahnwagon to slam Fulci without a second thought.

"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.