"Conquest" is a typical case of a "love it or hate it" movie. The crossover which Fulci tried was: take some of the barbarian hero stuff popular in the 80s (Conan, Beastmaster),combine it with the splatter horror the director is well known for, and give this a psychedelic edge with blurred, constantly foggy visuals and haunting synthesizer music. Surely not everybody's taste, not even for many fans of Fulci's other works. However, if you are in the right mood, "Conquest" is an experience that compares to no other fantasy horror movie...except maybe Bava's "Ercole al centro della terra"! The story can be given in a few lines: Ilias, a young man from a comparatively civilized country, travels to a barbarian land of many terrors. He meets the warrior Mace, and together they fight an evil sorceress who claims to be responsible for the rising of the sun, and is worshiped like a goddess by everyone who believes her (surprisingly many).

Fulci doesn't give any explanations, but lets us dive in head first. Don't ask "why do those zombies exist in the swamp?", "why does Zora appear out of thin air?" or "how can Sabrina Siani be beamed from the mountain top into the cave without Scotty around?". This is not the point. What Fulci shows us is a dream where everything is possible. Meet the creatures that lurk in your nightmares, and when there are no more arrows for the bow, it shoots lightning beams. A dream does not require logic. Even death is not certain here. I perfectly understand when people don't like this movie, because it is opposed to what one normally expects from a movie. However, I don't see this as a dumb or sloppy script - to me it appears to be a purposeful experiment that did not succeed entirely, but is unusual and challenging. As I said at the beginning: love it or hate it.

Bored with watching Zombie Flesh Eaters? Fed up with trying to figure out the End of City of the Living Dead? Scared that you'll waste money on 500 late era Fulci horror flicks?

Well, Conquest is the film for you....if you like drug-snorting wolfmen,

people being split in two lengthwise, topless sun Goddesses, and a director who must have replaced his corn flakes with LSD, replaced his milk with LSD, then ate all that LSD with a special spoon, made of LSD.

Fulci just goes beyond the call of duty in the 'creating another world' stakes, messing up just about every shot on purpose by pointing the camera in the direction of the sun. Otherworldly? How about 'throw out any notion of reality whatsoever'. Don't take this the wrong way though, the insane cinematography just helps this movie.

And as for plot, well there's this guy, see, and he sort of appears on a beach with a whole bunch of transparent people, then gets sent on some sort of mission of some sort, with a magic bow. He ends up, erm, somewhere else, and ends up getting his arse kicked over and over again until an animal rights barbarian shows up and helps him, and the two of them travel the land, fighting folks, heading for the topless Godessess place. For some reason.

Conquest is one of THE finest Italian insanity flicks I've sat down to watch - Here's a quick rundown of some of the madness:

1) Grenades made from leaves and rocks 2) Plenty of gore, including feeding from a severed head like it was a coconut. 3) Dolphin rescue teams 4) zombies, and bizarre cobweb monkey things. 5) The most awful special effects of flying arrows you'll ever see. 6) Great almost techno-like score. 7) Gore galore 8) Sudden plot twist that comes out of nowhere for no reason. 9) Concrete Nunchuks!

Great stuff all the way through - As it's a Fulci film, it has that dream-like quality that's almost like a sedative, but this film is a must for fans - get the Blue Underground, cleaned up, uncut version.

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.