Ignorance

I know this is generally Talya's domain, but I recently saw two movies that can't escape comment

FANTASTIC PLANET

A weird French sci-fi animated movie set to a prog-rock soundtrack. Not only is the animation really bizarre but the film is supposedly an allegory for the Soviet invasion of the Czech Republic: what?! Maybe this is just the present talking but cartoons as serious socio-political dissertations?! Ignorant

CONQUEST

I generally go in for this kind of crap, CONAN is definitely a favorite of mine, but this is just terrible. Now when I heard Lucio Fulci directed this I was excited by the sheer absurdity of such a concept, but I really should have given it more thought. This is definitely a Fulci movie, confusing "plot," ridiculous gore, and no character development at all. One can argue whether or not Fulci actually knows how to make movies, but he definitely has no clue how to make fantasy pictures. Fulci is so out of his element here it's ridiculous. First off this is more along the lines of CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR, CONQUEST can't even be called a swords-and-sorcery movie because no one even has swords! The non-villains in this movie are all cavemen, oh and every woman in this movie walks around topless. Even more bizarre is that even though the villains wear metal (in the stone age no less) they are mystified by the hero's special weapon, a bow and arrow! Whereas Fulci can get away with confusing plots in his horror pictures it really doesn't work here, so many plot points are left completely unanswered: why is the hero even here? How did he finally figure out the special power of the magic bow? and what's up with the main villainess turning into a coyote at the end?! The plot can be summed up thusly: some guy arrives from a faraway land with a magic bow, meets up with a weird freegetarian animal-lover/Fabio look-alike; the two walk around in circles arguing whether or not to destroy an evil sorceress; get into random battles with evil dudes, and finally destroy the evil witch-woman. Fulci obviously just threw together everything he thought consisted of a fantasy picture together into one big mish-mash of a cash in. AVOID AVOID AVOID