Weird Wednesdays: Conquest

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Hyperreal’s very own programmer Morgan Hyde presented the March 26 edition of Alamo’s Weird Wednesday, screening a standout deep cut from Italian gore-meister Lucio Fulci. 

While few of Fulci’s classic films appear to take place in the “real” world, Conquest (1983) is the director’s lone foray into the pure fantasy genre. The timing of its release lined up with the flood of low-budget sword-and-sorcery flicks that followed the success of Conan the Barbarian (1982). Yet, while overlooked in the filmmaker’s horror-heavy canon, true heads consider Conquest one of his major films due to its psychedelic intensity and unfiltered weirdness.

Unlike some of his gun-for-hire contemporaries in genre exploitation, Fulci committed fully to his lurid narratives, imbuing them with a unique cosmic intensity. The lack of codified rules for the “Conan ripoff” genre, with blood and nudity the only apparent prerequisites, gave him free reign to dream up a mythical acid trip world while indulging in his obsession with gruesome bodily breakdown. The film also pinches from the primitive society drama Quest For Fire (1981), although Fulci’s cave-dwellers are little more than monster food.

The plot concerns a young princeling, Ilias (played by future distribution mogul Andrea Occhipinti). Armed with a magic bow and arrow passed down by his elders, he travels to a primitive wasteland ruled by the sun witch Ocron (Sabrina Siani, who wears a gold mask and little else for most of the runtime). Ilias befriends a nomadic lunkhead named Mace (Jorge Rivero), and together they battle evil Chewbaccas, bog zombies, frog mutants and killer shrubs while Ocron seethes in her foggy nudity cave. 

Indeed, fog machines are absolutely roaring off-camera in nearly every scene of this movie, including exteriors. Much of the film was shot amid trippy landscapes in Mexico and the Italian island of Sardinia. Fulci and cinematographer Alejandro Alonso Garcia employ other reality-warping tricks like the opening shot, an eye-blearing double exposure overlaid with a hazy scrim evoking ancient times. Claudio Simonetti’s relentless, psycho-oscillating synth score throttles the audience even further into stoned submission.

The plot is enjoyably nonsensical, with a fascinating subversion of the standard hero’s journey (that I won’t spoil) which elevates the proceedings slightly from knock-off matinee fare. But make no mistake, Conquest is pure cinematic junk food. Ilias’ sole motivation for his quest is “be hero,” and Mace’s characterization is hilariously one-note - a misanthropic beast-whisperer, he refuses to kill animals but offs a hunter to steal his catch without a second thought. 

Fulci’s 41st (!) director credit, Conquest came in a middling late period of the director’s career, between the possession dud Manhattan Baby and the forgettable Warriors of the Year 2072. But it stands out for being so thoroughly Fulci. While the filmmaker worked on everything from westerns to giallo thrillers, the limits of the genre always bent to his immersive expressionism. Many of Conquest’s gory close-ups of battle wounds, weeping sores, and dismemberments would splice perfectly into the Gates of Hell trilogy, except that they feature bizarro monsters and glow-in-the-dark archery sets.

Special shout-out to the Weird Wednesday team for securing a glorious 35mm print that, although missing the most shocking gore moment (it’s in the Tubi version), has aged like fine wine - extra saturated and scratchy in the best way, with the Claudio Simonetti score set to arena rock volume level. If the phrase “the medium is the message” ever applied to a cult movie night, this is it.

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