CONQUEST (1983)

Starring: Jorge Rivero, Andrea Occhipinti, Sabrina Siani, Violeta Cela, Conrado San Martin. Written by Gino Capone, Jose' Antonio de la Loma, Carlos Vasallo. Directed by Lucio Fulci. Italy/Spain. 89 minutes.

If you're a lad or lassie in your late twenties or older, you'll probably remember the Sword & Sorcercy mini-boom of the early 1980s. You know the one I'm talking about. It was brief but highly memorable flurry of fantasy films that yielded such big-budget fare as John Boorman's Excalibur, John Milius' Conan the Barbarian, Disney's  Dragonslayer, and the British produced Clash of the Titans. On the lower-budget end of things were the modest but entertaining Tarzan-meets-Conan opus Beastmaster (by Phantasm director Don Coscarelli), Kurosawa protege' Albert Pyun's comic book-ish The Sword and the Sorceror, Jack Hill's Sorceress and the inept Deathstalker (which cost about $00.25 cents to make and was still such a financial disaster that it sank Roger Corman's production company, New World).

It's no surprise that the Italians, always quick to jump somebody else's train, got into the game themselves. They'd already made countless "peplums" (known better as "sword and sandle" films) since the runaway success of the first Hercules film way back in 1959, so it only seems natural they made at least one entry late in the Sword and Sorcery mini-boom. Conquest actually fits more comfortably in a S&S sub-genre that might be called - for lack of a better term - the "Sword and Sorcery Horror Movie". It's directed by Lucio Fulci after all, so it should come as no surprise that it's more like Mario Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World and Goliath vs. the Vampires than Conan.

Conquest opens with a trippy intro in which youthful pretty-boy Ilias (Occhipinti), a member of an davanced Utopian society, is prepared by a council of his elders for the Joeseph Campbell-ian quest that will usher him into manhood.  "Sooner or later each of us must face evil." Ilisas is told by a white-bearded Zeuss type. With that, he is given a magic bow (that shoots cheezy animated power bolts when he runs low on ammo) and sent to a prehistoric region where a topless cannibal witch (wearing a metal mask no less) named Ocron terrorizes the local population, who  look like extras from Quest for Fire.

Sound cheezey? It is. Gloriously so. So friggin' cheezey (accent on the "z", as in Cheez-Wiz") it makes the aforementioned Deathstalker look like an episode of Masterpiece Theatre.

Shortly after his arrival in this "very dark and evil domain", Ilias gets bum-rushed by a gaggle of Ocron's shaggy beast-men and is rescued by the barbarian Maxz (pronounced "maze", like the Indian word for corn dont'cha know), played by mucho macho manly man and Mexican soap star Jorge Rivero. Maxz carries an arsenal of prehistortic weapnry - including a nasty flail made out of a bone and a rock and a pair of primtive nunchakas - that he weilds with devastating effect. He joins Ilias on his quest and the two of them bumble about the countryside encountering weird monsters and partying with a tribe of mud-caked cavechicks.

Is Conquest a good movie? Hells no! But it's entertaining as hell. For one thing it's packed with tons of typical Fulci trademark gore and grue: women get ripped in half by beast-men; skulls get crunched, split open, bashed, hacked off and generally abused; poisonous lessions pop like self-squeezing zits and squirt puss. There's also a male metal-masked villain, shambling bog-men, and some endearingly cheezy puppet effects thrown in for good measure. Claudio Simonetti from Goblin provides a spaced-out synth score that works a peach.

Sadly, the film is marred by a befudling character inconsistancy (where the "noble savage" Maxz uses a feeble old man for bow practice) and a climax that once it rolls around is rather rushed and disappointing. In addition, some of the scenes are rather dark and muddy-looking on the print that I have (a laser disc dupe copped from Shocking Images), particularly one that take place in a bog that is rather hard to follow. Still, there's a scene about ten minutes into the movie that is of such bizarre, hallucinatory brilliance it made even these jaded eyes bulge out of my head in jaw-dropping disbelief. So, if you adore a good slab of Italian cheez they way I do Conquest is kind of hard to beat.

**1/2 Skulls full of maggots.

* Dead meat, ripe n' reeking.
** Moribund, but showing a slight flicker of life.
*** Good and healthy.
**** Brimming with vitality!