A Surprisingly Unforgettable Movie!

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Here's an interesting failure: goremeister Lucio Fulci's take on a fantasy film is packed full of excessive and disgusting violence guaranteed to bring up the lunch. Otherwise, it's a poorly-shot, poorly dubbed and poorly edited epic which relays the most simplistic of stories and tells it like it's something phenomenal and important. Sadly Fulci's decision to shoot some of the film through a gauze - in order to give it an appropriately other-worldly look - means that it's difficult to see what exactly is going on for a lot of the time. This spoils what is otherwise a fun film to watch. It's not in the least bit original, however; Fulci's two main influences seem to be CONAN THE BARBARIAN (inevitably) and the little-scene prehistoric gore flick MASTER OF THE WORLD from which all the head-cracking and brain-scooping is inspired.The show-stopping opening sees an innocent woman being captured by beast-men (who look like Chewbacca rather than anything resembling convincing) and then dismembered. Her severed head is taken to the evil chief, a woman known as Ocron who looks quite the part, naked, covered in gold paint and wearing a weird kind of mask. Ocron proceeds to bang a hole in the head and devour the brains inside - it's clear that Fulci puts his trademark gruesomeness into this film from the very beginning. From then on, we're introduced to the two leads, one a long-haired lout who is in touch with nature, the other a foppish kid who's handy with a bow and arrow. More baddies are spiked and clubbed than you can shake a stick at, often spilling blood as they do so. Any hits with blunt instruments also result in gouts of blood splashing everywhere.For his fantasy landscape, Fulci tints the sky red and shoots in an eerie, desolate moor land – the isolated setting is one of the film's best aspects and to the film's credit, a lot of the atmosphere comes from the backgrounds. This does generate some atmosphere, and it's just a shame that the world Fulci and his fellow producers created is hidden behind a white mist (or looks to be) for much of the film. Some crisp cinematography would have done wonders for this film and lifted it no end. Still, there are a lot of basic thrills to enjoy here; plenty of battles between good and evil and even some cheesy computer effects thrown in, which is pretty much par for the course for any low budget fantasy or sci fi flick of the 1980s. Fulci even finds time to throw in a cool zombie interlude which sees a load of marsh-strewn corpses wake up to attack our do-gooders and then get staked (perhaps they got confused with vampires).Other highlights see a poisoned man erupt with festering boils which then proceed to spill gooey slime everywhere - it's absolutely disgusting! The acting from the likes of muscle-bound Jorge Rivero (DAY OF THE ASSASSINS) and Andrea Occhipini (A BLADE IN THE DARK) is pretty hopeless, but Sabriana Siani (who made a career out of Italian fantasy flicks with this, THRONE OF FIRE, ATOR THE FIGHTING EAGLE and many others) is a pleasingly unconventional villainess. The blood is always flowing thickly and freely which make this bizarre outing worthwhile. It's not a good film perhaps, but certainly an entertainingly bad one just because it's so different.

It appears that Spagetti Fantasy has its fans. Obviously seeing the commercial success of movies like Conan the Barbarian, some Italians decided to make a bad copy...An evil queen prances around with snakes while wearing a golden mask and a spiky chastity belt, fearing a wanderer... what we get is a lot of silly action scenes, some gross special effects made on the cheap with lots of butcher shop scraps. The narrative is incomprehensible, the acting awful.I think that a condition of the peace treaty that ended WWII should have been Italy to give up all of its film cameras...

Crashing in to the craze set-up by "Conan the Barbarian" came quite an amusingly pulp sword and sorcery fable by Italian horror maestro director Lucio Fulci, which might be slender on story, packing a random, if stiff script and looking to be rather cheaply pulled off but he crafts out a lasting atmospheric air of odd imagery (as well as eerie sound effects) and hands out slabs of gusto violence (adding pulsating shocks of bloody violence --- especially to the head). In his latter career he would always be remembered for the excessive gore and nastiness in his features, but I what impressed me more anything is the moody atmospherics he brings aboard. I found "Conquest" to be quite effectively simmering in that regard. Helping out a lot is Claudio Simonetti ticking time bomb of an electronic score too. Rather unhinged, but extremely exhilarating and mystical. Fulci moves through one set-piece after another, either being a quick moving clip or a rather sluggish passage; nonetheless the primitive tailoring with its tacky make-up and chintzy special effects only add to this nightmarish air where a striking surreal edge is presented. Maybe taking away from the story's questionable developments. Some tripped out visuals of swirling mists and dark lighting compositions are caught by some innovative, flowing cinematography that's not afraid to get up close and personal, and also perfectly frames the picturesquely verdant backdrop. The performances are acceptable, but still on the plain side with the likes of Jorge Rivero, Andrea Occhipinti and Sabrina Sellers. I found the feature to get better as it went along, but it seems to make sure everything that occurs comes off too easy without much struggle and that goes for its anticlimactic final showdown. A fun and tatty exploitive tilt at the sword and scandal fantasy faze.

Sword and Sorcery flicks had their heyday in the early 80s, with "Conan The Barbarian" as the absolute highlight of the sub-genre, and tons of mostly immensely crappy low-budget flicks to follow. These films were so popular then, that even the godfather of gore himself, Lucio Fulci, decided to dabble in Fantasy's trashiest, and most entertaining sub-genre. Fulci's take on the Sword And Sorcery genre, namely this "Conquest" of 1983 is definitely not one of Fulci's masterpieces (more precisely, it is probably his dumbest movie), but it nonetheless outshines most other contemporary low-budget films of the kind. The storyline is extremely silly, and in spite of its flatness it is often confusing and makes little sense. People shouldn't watch Sword'n'Sorcery flicks and expect logic, however, and "Conquest" certainly has its qualities too. The film is atmospheric, and often quite bizarre, even more so than most other films of the genre, which is a quality in my book. I also liked the (quite strange) characters. The main villain is a nearly naked woman wearing a bizarre golden mask, who commands an army of beasts who are something in-between bears, wolves and men. While one of the heroes, Ilias (played by Andrea Occhipinti) looks like a total wuss, the other main character, Mace (played by Jorge Rivero) is basically a trashier version of Conan the Barbarian. Director Fulci also implicates the trade-mark gore, among other things heads are being crushed and people are torn into pieces.What especially makes this film watch-worthy, however, is the ingenious score by Claudio Simonetti, known to Horror buffs and Progressive Rock fans as the creative head of "Goblin", the ingenious band responsible for some of the greatest Horror film scores ever, most prominently those to Dario Argento's masterpieces. Simonetti always stands for brilliant film scores, and the progressive Rock score fits in with Sword and Sorcery better than one might expect. I would even go further, and say that the score to "Conquest" may very well be the single coolest soundtrack to any film of the genre. All things considered, "Conquest" is well worth watching. Fans of trashy 80s flicks, especially lovers of Sword And Sorcery should definitely give it a try!