Conquest (1983)

I hesitate to give Conquest any rating at all, even though I don’t take ratings seriously. This is not because it’s terrible — although you could make that argument — but because the movie so aggressively confounds expectations that it comes off as being highly experimental. As a result, this one-off, low-budget exploration of the Conan genre is difficult to recommend to a general audience.

But that’s not because the film is bad, per se. It seems to me that decisions were made, and made deliberately, to deliver this movie the way it ended up. The result is something like the most interesting of Jess Franco or Jean Rollin’s movies: low-budget genre films that refuse to stay on the trail, frustrating both idle viewers and film snobs alike. There’s a lot to respect in that, even if in the end the movie doesn’t quite gel.

Sword-and-sorcery fantasy movies can be organized on a kind of spectrum. On one end, you have movies like Lord of the Rings: rich, diverse fantasy worlds full of many races, deep mythologies, magical colleges and political intrigue. At the other end you have films like Conan the Barbarian: movies set in a world that’s deeply impoverished, where existence is decidedly hardscrabble and civilization itself seems on the verge of extinction. This more bleak end of fantasy films are rarely explored; the best examples that come to mind are post-apocalyptic science fiction instead. The Conan-style movies have more in common with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome than they do The Hobbit.

Conquest occupies a spot on this spectrum further away from Tolkien than Robert E. Howard’s creation; a world where humanity has barely progressed beyond the neolithic. It is a brutal and savage world where humans teeter on the precipice of oblivion. There are isolated clans of humans and one pathetically small culture dominated by the god-queen Ocron, who rules through the might of her wolfman enforcers and the threat that she will stop forcing the sun to rise every morning.

Into this world, from a distant and more civilized land we see not at all, comes the young adventurer Ilias with his magic bow. He is naïve and inexperienced, and quickly requires rescue from an outcast warrior named Mace. Mace wields a bone weapon roughly the size of nunchaku which he tends to use more as a flail; he has never seen a bow, much less a magic one. Mace agrees to team up with Ilias if Ilias will teach him archery. Meanwhile, Ocron is plagued by premonitions of a faceless man killing her with a bow. She tasks her wolfmen with murdering this bow-wielding stranger and bringing her the weapon.

Summarized thus, the movie seems quite conventional. But the telling is fragmented, character motivations unclear and often contradicted by the dialogue, and folks expecting Ilias to be the Hero in a Campbellian journey will be rapidly disoriented. The cinematography seems deliberately unclear. Mist and fog dominate, and when outdoor scenes are brightly lit the camera is placed so that characters are backlit and lens flare is maximized. The end result is much more dreamlike than many movies called dreamlike are, and the whole story has the feel of mythology half-reconstructed from poorly-preserved fragments of papyrus.

Again, the impression I get is this is precisely what Fulci was going for. You can dismiss the odd poorly-list scene or occasional lens-flare as a mistake, but when the entire movie is that way I feel like you have to assume that it was an artistic choice.

Fulci is famous for his gore effects, and Conquest delivers on these far more than, say, Red Sonja — a film that was infamous in my junior high-school peer group for the beheading count. Ocron likes to eat the brains of her victims. At least one of these is slowly torn apart by her wolfmen in a sequence that is no less stomach-turning for being entirely unbelievable. There are grotesque wounds and traumatized skin aplenty, but unlike other late Fulci films like Pagannini Horror (in my review queue) the rest of the movie doesn’t feel like an afterthought.

There’s tons of female nudity, although the film’s setting in a barely-formed civilization means people are often filthy as well. The exception is Ocron, who wears nothing but a bristling thong, a gold face-mask, and occasionally a snake throughout the entire film. If some of these scenes are supposed to be erotic, they miss the mark so wildly that again you question where the director was aiming in the first place.

There are lots of low-budget fantasy movies. You’ve got the Ator series, the Deathstalker movies (four of them!), the Mystery Science Theater classic Quest of the Delta Knights. All of these movies take a small budget and try to tell a conventional fantasy story as best they can. The result tends to fall somewhere between disappointing and hilarious. Fulci’s team is either unaware of the conventions or they simply don’t give a fuck. I tend to lean towards the latter interpretation; the end result is a movie that may not be “good” in the conventional sense but is at least interesting. It is also, perhaps, the best and most bleak mankind-on-the-brink fantasy film on the cheap side of the Conan franchise.

If that sounds appealing, it’s more than worth your time. I’ve watched it thrice.

Further warnings

Animal lovers beware that the movie includes a brief scene of (I am convinced) actual snake murder, demonstrating yet again why so many movies have statements about “no animals being harmed.” Unlike other movies of the time, the animal abuse does not appear to have been an intentional selling point, however.

The soft and misty visuals suffer if the movie is streamed. My first attempt watching this was through Amazon Prime, and I turned Conquest off assuming it was an over-compressed dirt-poor print. The Code Red release on blu ray is not much better, but it is widely considered to be the best this movie has ever looked on home video. The blu ray lacks subtitles and you will probably want them. I managed to get by with volunteer-produced subtitles.

Published Fri May 02 2025 10:00:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)