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Movie Review: Conquest (1983) aka La Conquista
By Tucker Battrell
I am about to tell you everything about this movie. Italian gore-hound Lucio Fulci tries his hand at the homo-erotic sword and talking to animals genre after spending his career slaving away with zombies and flesh-eating spiders. At first glance this doesn't look like it would deliver on the signature gore that has driven Fulci's work and his legend with horror fans, but that assumption is proven wrong almost immediately. The villain is a woman who never wears a top, gets it on with snakes and commands an army of wolf-people who raid villages, and rip women in half like wishbones. This being Fulci, you know I'm not exaggerating. Then the villain eats brains out of the wishbone's decapitated head. Then the pretty-boy hero who lives with a peaceful people sets out on a quest armed with a bow that shoots arrows made of sunlight. He meets up with an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer-lookin' fella who is "friend to no one" but seems to get along with birds. Lots of soft-focus shots of misty landscapes later, they are darts of some sort shot at them from the bushes. The arrows appear to have been scratched on the negative. So one hits pretty boy and he oozes pus and blood for a while until Unfrozen gets back from battling zombies (yay!) in order to get magic flowers to heal him. Then Unfrozen gets kidnapped by low-rent Jawa-types and tied to a piece of wood that gets thrown into the ocean where he clearly drowns. Then dolphins chew through the rope and bring him to the surface. I say, well if the dolphins went to all that trouble, you got to let him live. Apparently Fulci felt the same way, because he's alive! Then the pretty-boy gets abducted by wolf-men and decapitated. Unfrozen burns what's left of his body, rubs his ashes on his arms, summons his friend's bow and shoots everyone with sunlight including the boobie-villain who then turns into a wolf and walks away. Unfrozen walks into the mist and the first credit to role says "Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental". And that's what made this the funniest thing I have ever seen.
