Swords, sorcery and surrealism from one of Italy’s finest nutjob directors. This might be the looniest thing that Lucio Fulci ever made. You can’t take your eyes off it–and not just because the villain is a topless woman clad only in a metal face mask, skimpy showgirl bottoms and sometimes a live snake.
Our hero is your regular young and skinny, yet fearless, warrior in a fantasy land of magic and monsters. He comes complete with long hair and a loincloth and a mystical weapon (a LASER bow-and-arrow). His mission: Trek across dangerous territory, don’t get killed by the wolf-men lurking in the grass, the fish-men lurking in the water and the glow-eyed weirdos who hide among the rocks and that look like mummies except covered in cobwebby stuff, and make it to the castle up on the hill where Treacherous Tammy Topless likes to behead people and take credit for the sun. That’s about it. Along the way, he hooks up with another warrior, a bigger, older, more haunted loner and they bond over stealing other people’s meat and birdwatching.
This is one of those films that came out with the intention of riding the coattails of the success of Conan the Barbarian, but that I think is BETTER. Though it’s not without its charms, I’ve always found John Milius’s Conan slow, ponderous and overlong, defects that Conquest avoids as it gallops furiously across a lean ninety-two minutes and sustains an atmosphere of unpredictable weirdness for the entire run. ANYTHING can happen in this film, no matter how insane. Go, Fulci!
Adding to the hallucinatory mood is the film’s intentional hazy, gauzy look frequently accentuated by an ever-present layer of smoke. Is it to make the film look more dreamy or to smooth over the low-budget effects? My guess is that the intention was the latter, but it manages to achieve the former. Big time.
The ending to this madness is abrupt, but appropriate. It feels like you just woke up.