Topic: The Movie Thread

I've been continuing my journey in Italian sword and sorcery exploitation movies of the Eighties. Most if not all of them follow the same tropes, have bad dubs, fun cheesy action scenes, awkward nudity, and some funky wizard or sorcerer they need to defeat. The genre is not that dissimilar to the barbarian exploitation movies of the same time, just with more magic. My favorite one so far is called Conquest and was directed by none other than acclaimed Horror Director Lucio Fulci. Like many movies of the same genre (and movies in general) it closely follows Joseph Campbell's 'Heroes Journey' formula, and Conquest is no different. It's about a young man called Ilias, who as you may have guessed heads out on a journey into manhood. All heroes need a weapon and his is a magic bow that through the power of VFX can shoot through walls and even mountains. I think it uses the power of the sun, that part I wasn't sure of. He fights a lot of monsters and a very naked sorceress who is also a queen, it's darker than most of those films in the genre so she also eats people. I really enjoyed it but can't share a trailer because she's naked in that too. But I can share the trailer for the next movie.

Next up was Sorceress, Directed Jack Hill and produced by Roger Corman so I knew what to expect going in. The premise was fairly simple. An evil wizard does a deal with a demon God called Caligara, and in order to get even stronger he must sacrifice a child. The woman escapes, gives birth to twin girls, Mara and Mira. She hides them with a warrior named Krona who then trains them to be warriors. The catch is that because they are hiding in the wilderness with this warrior man they don't know what girls are, so they think they are boys. In English it's tomboys. When they leave the wilderness (to set off on revenge) they keep taking their tops off (because the men warriors they meet are topless) and there's a lot of 'what do you mean you don't have these?' oh and they meet a fawn or something in the forest and there's an awkwardly funny scene about his flute. I think it was soft-core pornography, it's hard to tell with Italian exploitation. The twins were Playmates too, so it's possible. Either way it was bad but funny, I liked the ape-men and zombies too. It was the last film Jack Hill directed, I think he even tried to remove his credit. Like all Corman movies it too used recycled scenes from some of his other movies, in particular Battle Beyond the Stars (which gave James Cameron one of his earliest roles, working on miniatures) Corman was prolific in recycling scenes, going so far as to shoot some scenes on multiple cameras, change out actors, and use the different footage for entirely different movies. I watched one once that was over eighty-percent recycled footage, score too.