Conquest

The strangest of the Italian barbarian pictures, because Lucio Fulci had no interest in the barbarian picture and made a gore film in a loincloth instead. A young hero with a magic bow crosses a primitive world toward a topless golden-masked sorceress who wants him dead, and the plot is mostly an excuse for decapitations, werewolves and body horror. Fulci drowns every frame in so much dry-ice fog that the whole film looks like it was shot inside a cloud, partly to hide the budget and partly because he simply liked it that way. It is dreamlike, incoherent and far nastier than any Deathstalker knockoff. One for Fulci obsessives, and a bafflement to everyone else.