Rating: **
Review Date: 8/2/15
Director: Lucio Fulci
Cast: George Rivero, Andrea Occhipinti, Sabrina Sellers, Maria Escola
A psychedelic fantasy film about a young man (Andrea Occhipinti) with a magic bow who leaves his peaceful homeland in search of adventure. He gets more than he bargained for when he gets attacked by the evil (and completely naked) sorceress Ocron (Sabrina Sellers), and is rescued by a barbarian warrior named Mace (George Rivero). Mace is intrigued by Ilias's bow and agrees to travel with him in exchange for learning how to use it. After the beautiful Maria Escola is murdered by Ocron's army of wolfmen, Ilias swears revenge and sets out to kill her. Mace reluctantly tags along, and helps to fulfill the quest.
The story is exceedingly simplistic, but director Lucio Fulci's dreamlike style is mesmerizing. The cinematography is beautiful and the entire film appears to be shot through gauze and a thick blanket of smoke. The colors are bold and the art direction is intriguing. Mace's preferred weapon is a nunchaku made of stone, bone, or wood, and is very strange. Equally strange is Ilias's bow, which doesn't require arrows and shoots beams of light from the sun. Apart from a gold mask and spiked bikini bottoms, Ocron is completely naked throughout the film, which is odd and mildly erotic. She eats human brains and has a fondness for snakes, which she likes to get intimate with. It's definitely a bizarre and gory film, made even stranger by an out of place electronic music score. It's certainly not to everyone's taste, but I found it weird enough to be interesting, and not crazy enough to completely alienate me.