Reviews

I'll have to admit, I have a lot of fun with this one every time I watch it, which by now has to be four or five, since it often seems the perfect Saturday afternoon entertainment. It's often criticized as lazy, cheap, uneventful, and leaden-paced, but the charm of low rent Italian shlock has a tendency to take hold of me when I let my guard down, and this movie delivers exactly what you'd expect from an Italian sci-fi movie from 1981 called "Contamination," and does so in spades. There is Atrocious dubbing and absurd dialogue, messy gore, a lot of guys in white containment suits and gas masks running around, a bubbly synth soundtrack, green goo, and several dubious plot points (example: why do only three people go to investigate something that may be a threat to the entire planet?).

The accusation that this is a cheap steal of "Alien" doesn't hold up well either, since the imagery of an exploding chest is all that's retained from Ridley Scott's movie, and even the way that's handled has nothing to do with hostile alien larvae. The concept here is all Cozzi's - and admittedly it's not the greatest concept, as the villainous Alien at the center of the mystery, a heaving cyclopean blob of tentacles, has no apparent motive in wanting to destroy all human life other than that it is "evil" and "superior" (what does it want to populate the earth with - itself?), and our characters in peril have to repeatedly act as if their primary foes - glowing green alien eggs that pulse and explode but actually are not capable of movement - are absolutely terrifying. I applaud Cozzi for going in a direction other than "small cast of characters trapped in claustrophobic setting with hungry beastie," but it's obvious that a little more attention to detail was needed in the editing room. I imagine this was a rushed production.

Nevertheless, we are left with funny and entertaining cheese that I heartily recommend. Cozzi never addresses the shortcomings previously mentioned, concentrating on the action and intrigue, so we're left with a flick that moves along fairly speedily and doesn't get boring, even if it doesn't always make sense. There are some crude but memorable gore and creature effects and I didn't think the cast was too bad, all things considered. It's always good to see Ian McCulloch, and this time he is an embittered drunk who was excommunicated by the scientific community after reporting alien life on Mars. He's actually playing a more developed character here than he did in "Zombie," and for the brief scenes that he has to play the action hero he doesn't do too badly. All in all this an under-appreciated gem that knows how to entertain and does so shamelessly.

If there's any movie Lucio Fulci made that inspires equal love and hatred, it must be this, the director's lone fore into the Sword and Sorcery subgenre. The general opinion of its detractors seems to be that "Conquest" marked the beginning of Fulci's descent into both commercial and artistic mediocrity, and while the former may be true, I'm not understanding the latter. In light of what Fulci's work aspires to be, "Conquest" can in many ways be seen as a culmination of his style, and if your best criticisms of the movie are that it's "plotless and cheap," I wonder why you're watching a Fulci movie in the first place.

Sure, the plot is a rudimentary blob that in the end amounts mostly to characters wandering back and forth as an excuse to get them into perilous situations involving traps and monsters, but Fulci's visual sensibilities are positively ON FIRE here, so much so that the limitations of the story become pretty much inconsequential. They take a back seat to the otherwordly mythic fantasy environment that Fulci is able to create with the most frugal materials. It is the foreboding fog-shrouded swamps, ancient stone temples, grotesque creatures and lurid-colored alien skies that will linger in the mind as the work of an artist who clearly has an eye for distinctive visuals. You could only accuse this of being a movie derivative of "Conan the Barbarian" if you completely ignored this aspect of it, because I can't think of another film that looks anything like this.

Other aspects of "Conquest" work to its advantage in subtle ways. The spare, monosyllabic dialogue helps to create the sense of a primitive and brutish world and the minimalist pulses of Claudio Simonetti's electronic score mesh well with the stunning visuals. Bizarre details - the villainess' gold mask and fascination with snakes, the enchanted bow that glows blue, the dolphin rescue - border on the surrealistic. The effect achieved, at least to this viewer, is hypnotic. I find myself wondering how so many filmmakers today, when they are given all the resources in the world and can't give us one interesting thing to look at, can be treated so leniently by critics who would jump on the bahnwagon to slam Fulci without a second thought.