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Santayana pined for a "poetry of barbarism," Lucio Fulci delivers it in spades. Gods and monsters on "the path of courage and sacrifice," from paradise to wasteland with the scrawny wanderer (Andrea Occhipinti) wielding ancestral bow and laser projectiles. He's the faceless warrior stalking the visions of the villainess (Sabrina Siani), who presides bare but for spiked thong, golden mask and serpent draped across her breasts. (Her cruelty is illustrated by making a meal out of the brains of a freshly slaughtered maiden, torn in half by her lupine hordes.) Aiding the premonition is the brutish nomad (Jorge Rivero), who has little use for fellow humans but plenty of love for critters at large. "When a man meets a man, you never know which one will die, but when an animal meets a man, it's always the animal that dies. I'm on the animal's side." A fever dream on some prehistoric alien planet, Fulci's Satyricon and no mistake, a vortex of hazy light and oozing viscera. "The darkest and most dreadful creatures of the earth" are sent to stop the protagonists, from swamp ghouls to shape-shifting doppelgängers to cobweb-wrapped humanoids. Swathes of dark purple sky and patches of festering skin figure in the inclination toward psychedelic abstraction, pagan arias throb courtesy of Claudio Simonetti's synthesizers. A film of many berserk images, viscous blood added to a cavewoman's ashen facepaint, the werewolf captain punished by burning on a colossal hot plate, dolphins to the rescue during a cliffside crucifixion. The heroic quest into manhood leads to a severed head with staring eyes, "you have slayed his body but not his soul!" Arrow cracks mask at the close, and there's the "beauté bestiale" Fénéon spoke of in Rimbaud. With Conrado San Martín, José Gras, Violeta Cela, and Gioia Scola.
--- Fernando F. Croce |