by ·Comments Off on Conquest (1983, Lucio Fulci)

Opens with an old man sending a young archer on his adventuring way, all double exposed on a beach with a Goblin soundtrack, and I’m afraid my story description from here on isn’t going to make much sense. Nicely summed up (in a positive review!) on lboxd: “every scene is clouded in iridescent fumes & I don’t know why anybody does anything.”

Wolf-suited tax collectors rip a girl apart so their snakey nudist leader can gobble her brains. Is she then killed by an arrow of light shot by our faceless archer or was that a vision? Our hero Elias is armed with a bow and four arrows, but is attacked by fourteen dudes, then rescued by an animal-loving stone-nunchuck warrior called Mace with lipstick runes on his forehead. Mace won’t kill animals so he steals all his food, keeps a cavegirl nearby until her head is smashed in by dog soldiers in the next scene.

Obsessively backlit – both this and Conan‘s best parts are their music, but this one is better for being wildly unpredictable. “Birds flying towards the water… that’s not good.”

Birdie:

The kid gets poisoned by a barrage of film-scratch darts coming from the weeds, and Fulci finds a way to get zombies into the movie as Mace braves a horde to collect a poison-healing herb. Then Mace gets attacked by his shadow self (Cactus-faced Zora in disguise) and it’s his turn to be captured by cobwebbed cave muppets, and the kid has to rescue him.

Somehow the kid keeps finding arrows in a land that’s never seen a bow before – have I mentioned this? – but finally he starts shooting blanks and letting the effects team add bolts of light. Mace is rescued by dolphins then attacked by powervaulting cave furries… the villains behead the kid but the nude woman can’t devour his brain because he opens his eyes… I dunno anymore.

Fulci in his heyday (The Beyond was the year before) ripping off Conan – even titled so they’d sit together alphabetically in video stores, good move. The kid’s career path was a Howard Hawks film -> this -> Werewolf with Joe Estevez. Stonechuck warrior Andrea Occhipinti had just starred in Fulci’s New York Ripper, and the nude girl Sabrina Siani specialized in playing the nude girl in this sort of movie. Like Conan this won no oscars. Big congrats to Oppenheimer but in another 40 years we’ll see which of these movies people are still watching.

by ·Comments Off on Conan the Barbarian (1982, John Milius)

On Oscars night I thought we should watch something that never* won an award, and so, Conan.

Painted-up horseback killers arrive and destroy young Conan’s town, kill his dad first, then James Earl Jones (with beautiful long hair and named Salsa Doom) beheads Conan’s mom and takes all the town’s kids to be millwheel slaves. Our kid grows into Arnold whilst pushing the millwheel, then gets thrown into gladiator battle where he caves in the other guy’s head, leading to a montage of him killing a lot of guys and “realizing his sense of worth,” haha. After the one-on-one fights in Universal Soldier 6, the chaotic action mishmash of this was bound to disappoint. Impressed, his slavemasters send him to fighting school but some redbeard randomly frees him then he immediately finds a kickass Earth God sword.

The Empty Man, Earth God:

Arnold doesn’t know how to socialize properly, so he has sex with a sorceress while she’s in the middle of reciting his prophecy, then hurls her into the fireplace. He meets Gerry Lopez (thief, archer, and surfer in Milius’s Big Wednesday) and they run around Spain to the lovely adventure music of Basil Poledouris (later a Verhoeven accomplice). Soon after he punches a camel, they meet a cute lady thief (Sandahl Bergman of Hell Comes to Frogtown) and together rob a snake-cult tower and behead the snake god within.

King Max von Sydow congratulates them and sends them on a mission to unkidnap his daughter from the snake cult. Conan ditches the others and runs the rescue mission solo for some reason, asking directions from some hippies, and meeting wizard Mako (The Bird People in China) who lends him a camel, which he learns should be ridden, not punched. Arriving in snaketown, Arnold seduces some guy to steal his cult robes, but he’s not very sneaky and Salsa Doom’s men crucify him on the tree of woe. Really shouldn’t have come alone.

His buddies arrive belatedly and Mako kwaidans him back to life. They sneak in and massacre the palace guards, getting green soup everywhere, while Salsa Doom transforms into a snake and crawls off. The cute girl thief dies of snake wounds before Arnold can find a fireplace to hurl her into. Arnold heals up and goes back to slash his way through more guys, with help from buddies Gerry and Mako and the ghost of his dead girlfriend, beheads Salsa Jones and all the cultists go home. Ends slowly, with a sequel setup, but instead of Conan the Destroyer (a Richard Fleischer/Jack Cardiff joint, shorter, with Grace Jones) I think I’m supposed to watch the Lucio Fulci ripoff Conquest.

*This lost Saturn awards to Star Trek II, Tron, E.T., The Dark Crystal, and Poltergeist, a pretty good lot, but in 2001 it won a DVD commentary award. I listened to a couple minutes of commentary around the camel-punching scene, and nah, I would’ve gone with Charlie’s Angels.

Guess this was technically a rewatch since I remember catching it on cable at Brad’s house in 1983… now that it’s fresh in my mind, bring on the new Mandico version. Milius had recently cowritten Apocalypse Now and 1941, I guess he was into warfare in every era. Producer Dino de Laurentiis also made Halloween III and Amityville II this year, and Edward Pressman and Oliver Stone had just made The Hand.