Conquest



In recent weeks I’ve been pretty hard on Lucio Fulci and the crappy horror movies he made. But what about other genres? Was Fulci just constrained by the conventions of the splatter movie? I watched Conquest (1983), a nominal sword and sorcery film (nominal because of a complete lack of swords) Fulci directed. Guess what? Conquest features the same over-reliance on cheap gore and complete disdain for storytelling as Fulci’s horror films.


"Don't lie to me, son. I can see right through you."

Conquest starts with a scene that establishes Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti) as a youth of some fairly advanced culture. There’s some sort of ceremony on a beach, and Ilias receives a magic bow from his father. The entire scene is shot as a double exposure, so Ilias’ people look transparent the whole time.

Ilias travels by boat to a more savage land, one terrorized by Ocron (Sabrina Siani), a naked sorceress with a metal mask that makes her look like Destro’s fetish dream. Ocron controls a smallish horde of dog-headed men, which she uses to harvest freshly decapitated heads to suck the souls out of. Ilias runs afoul of this horde pretty quickly, and his bow gives him a huge advantage in a land where no one has thought of ranged weapons of any kind. However Ilias runs out of arrows in one fight, and is saved by Mace (Jorge Rivero), a beefy guy who has invented a primitive stone… mace. I guess he named it after himself, and the name stuck until today. Mace has a mark on his forehead that means he “calls no man friend,” but he decides to make an exception for Ilias. Ilias isn’t much of a man, anyway. Part of Mace’s philosophy is that he won’t kill animals. That doesn’t mean he’s a vegetarian, mind you. Instead he waits for other hunters to kill animals, then kills those hunters and takes the dead animals for himself. Ilias gleefully jumps aboard this gravy train.


"My name is Mace, and this is my.... mace. Will that work for you?"

Ilias and Mace have some more run-ins with Ocron’s pooches, and then Ilias decides he’s had enough and leaves by boat. Mace wanders a bit and is captured by these weird creatures that look like bad gorilla costumes covered in spider webs. Just when things look their worst Ilias comes back, but now his bow shoots lasers! Just the thing to take care of Ocron.

Conquest was obviously shot on the cheap, with what little money the film had going to a smoke machine and the animated arrow effects. Even the worst examples of the sword and sorcery movie (Deathstalker, I’m looking at you…) make some kind of token attempt to include a monster, but the cobweb chimps are about as close as Conquest comes. The sudden shift in focus from Ilias to Mace is extremely jarring, and would make a good cautionary example of how not to construct a plot in film school.


Watch out! Killer ALF!

Posted: Tue - September 14, 2004 at      

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