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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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2
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5 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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SNEAK
PREVIEW
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DVD Release Date: July
27, 2004 |
While
best known for such gory horrors as Zombie
and The Beyond, the late Lucio
Fulci directed films in a diverse array of genres throughout
his career. So it's no surprise that in the early 1980s, as
the Italian film industry was churning out endless knockoffs
of anything even semi-popular, exploitation specialist Fulci
got to try his hand at a Sword and Sorcery flick. The result
was Conquest —
sort of Beastmaster meets Clan
of the Cave Bear —
and it's a dreadful mess. Even the likes of Ator
the Blade Master and Deathstalker
kick it's mangy butt. Perhaps
I should say murky butt... Ol' Lucio really had the fog
machines cranked up to maximum for this one.
Nor does it help that virtually every scene looks like it was
shot with a glob of Vaseline smeared across the camera lens.
The virtually plotless Conquest
follows a young man names Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti) who, armed
with a magic bow handed down by his ancestors, leaves his more
advanced people to wander around a Stone Age land inhabited
by monsters and cave
dwelling primitives. (He's not on a particular quest or anything;
he doesn't even have a destination. Why and where he's supposed
to travel isn't really important, apparently.) Along the way
he meets and befriends a brawny warrior named Mace, played by
Mexican actor Jorge Rivera in a bad Conan wig. Mace is a fierce
slayer of men and monsters but a committed PETA member —
he
won't kill animals for food. Like the Beastmaster he can communicate
with critters and doesn't want to hurt his pals. (His most meaningful
exchanges are with dolphins and a bat.) So what does Mace —
certainly
no farmer —
do for dinner?
He nonchalantly kills some poor innocent schmuck who ambles
by carrying a dead pig. Later, while Mace tucks into the roast
pork with gusto, Ilias questions his ethics. "I
didn't kill it," the warrior explains, referring to the
pig he's now chowing down on. Ilias sees the wisdom of his ways.
After strolling about the marshy, perpetually foggy landscape
for a time, the boys stop to temporarily shack up with a family
of cave dwellers. This primitive clan is headed by a woman who
gives Mace a friendly shag whenever he passes through bringing
food, and she has a perky-breasted daughter who wants to extend
the same favor to young Ilias. But his chance at some cave nookie
is interrupted when they're attacked by a platoon of dog soldiers.
(Looking like a cross between Chewbacca
and the Wolf Man, these beast-warriors use stone axes and spears.)
The family gets wiped out; Ilias is captured and carried off.
Mace follows the bad guys, attacks their camp at night (in a
fight scene so dark you can barely tell what's going on), and
rescues his friend. He explains that the dog-men are soldiers
of Ocron (Sabrina Siani), an evil sorceress too powerful to
oppose.
Guided by the concept of justice taught in his homeland, Ilias
determines that Ocron must be punished for killing innocent
people. (Uh... so what about that guy with the pig, dude?)
Reluctantly, Mace accompanies him on the journey to Ocron's
mountainous domain.
What they don't know is that the sorceress is expecting them.
Lately she's been having dreams of a wandering warrior who kills
her with a magic bow. (Topless, wearing nothing but a G-string,
Ocron is a snakehandling witch in a golden mask who likes to
eat human brains!) After her beast-men fail to capture or kill
our two heroes, she orgasmically
writhes on a slab to summon a supernatural ally, Zora, an armored
being who looks like a Marvel Comics villain (and a bit like
the lunar wizard in Hercules
Against the Moon Men). Ocron promises her body and soul
to Zora if he'll kill the strangers for her...
Just
one or two cheesy laughs amid 93 very long minutes save
Conquest from the total ignominy
of a "1" rating. A close call, though. Dull
and plodding, it doesn't help that it's visually the murkiest
film I've ever seen... "Seen" being a debatable term
here. The entire flick is shot in a haze; some scenes offer
the triple whammy of being woefully underlit, in soft-focus
and with multiple fog machines running full tilt. At
times you can barely make out a damn thing!
(This isn't due to a bad transfer and/or lousy source elements,
either; see below.) The
special effects — there's a magic bow, remember — are
just terrible, in the same league as The
Puma Man and those
Lou Ferrigno Hercules flicks. But poor cinematography and effects
have nothing to do with the lameness of the story, which gives
us nothing and no one to care about or root for. There's very
little dialog. Ilias and Mace wander around for awhile, interrupted
by the occasional fight scene (lots of slo-mo jumping), then
take turns getting captured and escaping. Some zombies attack.
Rivera and Occhipinti share long, meaningful glances at each
other. (Let's not go there...) Interspersed with all
this nothingness are scenes of Ocron fondling her snake, torturing
her underlings or complaining about why the heroes haven't been
killed yet.
Conquest is
certainly gorier than other '80s Sword and Sorcery fare, but
for fans of Fulci's splatter films it won't be enough —
there's a pretty good head bashing, some brain-eating, pus-oozing
boils and a half-naked woman is used as a (rrrrrrip!)
human wishbone, but nothing approaching the likes of Zombie
or City of the Living
Dead. And while I'd hoped that the electronic
score by Goblin alum Claudio Simonetti would at least be a positive
factor, turns out it's not. Mostly just annoying, some of its
passages may have worked well in a giallo — but not here.
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mentioned above, Fulci
used some kind of soft-focus process so almost the entire film
looks like it was shot in a sauna. This was an aesthetic choice
on his part; I think it's a mistake, even if he was just trying
to cover up cheap production values. (I prefer footage of barebreasted,
snakehandling witches to be razor sharp in its clarity, but that's
just me.) Typically, Blue Underground does everything possible
to bring us the best quality transfers and this DVD is no exception
— so if you think the movie looks too damn fuzzy, well, you gotta
blame Lucio. A bit of dirt is evident during the opening, when
Ilias is given his bow, but otherwise BU's transfer is about as
good as Conquest will ever look.
(I attribute the heavy grain marring some scenes to the way it
was originally lensed.) The film is presented in 1.85:1 format,
enhanced for widescreen TVs, with a Dolby 2.0 Surround English
audio track. Sound quality trends flat during the few exchanges
of dialog; Simonett's score sometimes overpowers everything else.
Extras include two theatrical trailers (the nudity-filled European
one and the more chaste U.S. version), a photo gallery, and a
text bio of Fulci.
7/10/04 |
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