Sword and Sorcery films were popular for a short time in the early 80s following the release of Conan the Barbarian, and there were many low budget films made to cash in on that popularity. This film by Italian horror filmmaker is one of those movies, although with the low production values and mist shrouded sets, it feels more like a depraved version of Krull than Conan with it's much better production values.
It starts with a young man named Illias being given a magic bow that creates it own magic blue arrows by an old man and is sent off to become a warrior. Shortly after this, the villain, a woman wearing a golden mask (and only a golden mask) sends her minions (they look like wookies) to kill everyone in Illias' tribe, which they do with glee. They cut the top of the old man's skull off and tear a naked woman limb from limb. (One of the places this movie seems to free up costs is by having all the characters run around naked. Seriously nobody in this movie is fully dressed. The other way they save money is by having all the sets pumped full of too much fog.)
I told you there were wookies in this movie.
The wookies return to Naked Gold Mask Lady's cave where they all snort hallucinogens. While she is lying on the floor wrapped in a giant python and stoned, Naked Gold Mask Lady has a vision of being murdered by Illias. So once again she send her army of wookies out on a murder spree, this time with orders to kill Ilias. Which they almost do, until Ilias is rescued by a man named Mace. Mace likes to wear fur and fights with a set of nunchucks made of stone. He also likes animals.
Zora, Ilias' head, and Naked Gold Mask Lady
Ilias and Mace hit it off and do plenty of male bonding while killing humans, wookies, and mud encrusted zombies. At one point Mace is crucified on a big wooden X and tossed in the ocean by what I think might be a frog man, only to be rescued by dolphins (liking animals pays off, apparently). Topping off the fun, Ilias gets decapitated by Zora, a creature made of little metal plates. That would be the sad part of the movie... but Mace does absorb Ilias' power by rubbing his unwashed body with the ashes of Ilias' poorly cremated body.
Mace kills Naked Gold Mask Lady, and learns that she was really ugly underneath that mask, and the audience asks themselves "What the hell did I just watch?" while the credits roll.
If you wanna start watching Fulci, I'd start with The Beyond. And if you liked the Conan films and wanna see more, I'd suggest watching Krull before this. But if you wanna see a depraved movie with lots of violence and nudity and don't care if the plot makes sense, put this on your list right below Mountain of the Cannibal God.
The cheesemaker's rotten corpse has been found down in the caves. I figure that's Armok's way of telling me that it's time to start building catacombs. I have another pressing problem, a blood
New Pastures. Will require walls.
soaked troglodyte loitering on the surface scaring all my dwarves. On closer look, it's no wonder he's scaring people, his belly is cut open with his injured spleen and intestines on display. But not to worry, the militia has been dispatched.
It has been brought to my attention that a calf has starved to death! Starved! What moron has been managing the livestock. I designate a series of new pastures and make sure all grazing animals are assigned.
And my farmers keep insisting that they don't have seeds to plant with when my bookkeeper insists that I am sitting on hundreds of seeds. Something's wrong here...
Gleeris the Thief. Standing in the doorway.
But at this point I am interrupted with the news that a thief has been found in my fortress. Gleeris, the kobold thief. It seems it is way too easy to get into this fortress.
Back to my seed problem- For their insolence, I have decided to force the dwarves to gather plants from the surface, like elves, while I track down the problem.
Speaking of problems, I have almost run out of surface trees to clear cut. I think it may be time to breach the caverns and build an underground forest.
And what to do with my collection of caged troglodytes (including one who killed two dwarves and a peacock)?
As promised, I am finally getting around to reviewing this movie...
Four of the Apocalypse, a spaghetti western by Lucio Fulci and based on two short stories by Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat. who would later go on to make The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, and The House by the Cemetary. Most of his movies very violent, and this one is no exception. If you decide to watch this movie, it's less a movie with a plot, than a movie about a series of depraved things happening to bad people.
Stubby Preston, a gambler finds himself tossed in local jail soon after arriving in town. There he meet up with the pregnant prostitute Bunny O'Neil, town drunk Clem and madman Bud. They don't remain in jail long, as vigilantes descend on the town and kill everyone but them. The four of them escape into the Utah wilderness where they run into the gun toting bandit Chaco. Despite the fact that he apparently shoots everything he sees, they welcome him into their band at first.
They have such a "fun" time with Chaco... he shoots a huge pile of small game for them to eat, he saves them from other marauding bandits, forces them to watch as he tortures aforementioned marauding bandits, forces them to take hallucinogens, rapes Bunny while the others are forced to watch, shoots, Clem in the leg, and steals Stubby's razor before leaving them in the desert without any supplies. If the other four are metaphorically the four horsemen of the apocalypse, then Chaco must be Satan himself.
Never trust a homicidal madman, kiddies.
The Utah desert is such a small place when forced to share it with Chaco. Fortunately Chaco is apparently easily distracted and looses interest in them when he stumbles across a band of Mormons to shoot. Not since Yosemite Sam, has the wild west seen a villain so evil. While cradling the corpse of a child randomly murdered by Chaco, Stubby swears that he will kill Chaco. The story has given us no indication thus far, however that he can actually pull that off...
During a torrential rainstorm, they take refuge in an abandoned mining town and wonder aloud why it was abandoned. I know why it was abandoned, it's because it never stops raining there! Seriously did nobody Fulci that it rainstorms out in the desert last for something like five minutes? Despite being rained in, the four of them are happy there, Stubby and Bunny are happy because they get to lay around naked, Clem is happy because he dies and no longer has to be in this movie, and Bud is really happy because he gets to run around the cemetery talking to the dead people and because he gets to feed Clem's left butt-cheek to Stubby and Bunny... Wait, what?!
So it's time for Stubby and Bunny to leave Bud behind with his dead people and move on. They soon run into a traveling minister, who happens to be an old friend of Stubby. Now, we all know that some sort of misfortune will befall the minister just because of his association with him. But what sort of misfortune will that be, exactly?
They end up in the snowy town of Alderville. It's located high in the mountains and is populated solely by men for some reason. It is here that Bunny goes into labor. The whole town gather around while Bunny gives birth and promptly dies, (thus returning Alderville to it's previous all male population). The men of Alderville get together and decide to name the boy "Lucky".
So Stubby leaves Lucky, the minister, and the men of Alderville behind and returns to the road armed with a bottle of whiskey and a gun given to him as a going away present. He rides off into the desert with the soundtrack playing a 70s folk rock tune when he stumbles onto Chaco and his gang sleeping in a barn. Stubby shoots them all, taking his sweet time with Chaco. And he got his lucky razor back.
That's right, Internet people, I've got a little puzzle for you today. This one is attributed to Einstein, it's his Neighbour Riddle. It's claimed he said 98% of the population couldn't solve it, but I'm certain that if you can solve a Sudoku puzzle, you can work it out.
Here it is:
There are five houses, each one is painted a different color. The owner of each house has a different nationality, smokes a different brand of cigarette, drinks a different beverage, and keeps a different animal as a pet.
The question is, who owns the Batman-eating Tiger?
Hints:
The Brit lives in the red house
The Swede keeps dogs.
The Dane drinks tea.
The green house is on the left of the white house.
The green homeowner drinks coffee.
The person who smokes Pall Mall owns a bird.
The owner of the Yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The man in the center house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The man who smokes blends lives next to the one who has cats.
The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhill.
The one who smokes Bluemaster drinks beer.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
The man who smokes blend has a neighbour who drinks water.
Alright, I'm a sucker for sock monkeys, this is the third one I've made. They're so easy to put together on as a spur of the moment project that it's almost hard not to amass a collection of them. It doesn't hurt that the drug store around the corner from my house has some brightly colored knee socks on sale for cheap.
This one is a bit of an experiment, as I knew that I wouldn't have enough polyfill laying around, I decided to use plastic grocery bags to stuff it instead. I find that it works reasonably well with a few caveats. First, it doesn't have as much spring to it as polyfill, so it doesn't bounce back as much when you squeeze it. Second, the bags are visible through the socks I used, which you can see in the photo below of it's arm seam. And the finished monkey weighs noticeably more than the ones I stuffed with polyfill. Finally it took a lot more bags to stuff than I expected. I ended up using all but a handful of the plastic bags I had on hand. All said, plastic bags do work for filling stuffed animals, but I'm gonna keep using polyfill.
I also tried a different approach to stitching the arms and tail on. In my previous sock monkeys, I stitched a flap to the body, ending up with a seam that looks a bit like a hinge. With this one I figured out I could sew the end of the limb to the body then hide the seam by stitching the circumference of the limb to the body. The end result looks much prettier.
Previous Attempt.
Notice the ugly seam attaching the arm.
The arrival of summer brings a newly appointed bookkeeper and a nasty rotting mess in my butcher's workshop. Perhaps it was unwise of me to designate a small refuse pile next to the butcher's shop to minimize the distance he has to go to get a butcherable corpse.
As I go to check on my miner's efforts at digging out a series of future bedrooms, I am interrupted with a message that my armorer has been interrupted by a giant olm! "What?" I ask myself, as I haven't breached the caverns yet. I zoom to the location and find that my dwarves have been playing in the cave (I had forgotten about the cave.)
I found my armorer facing down two troglodytes, one dead and in a pool of it's own blood, and the other very much alive. No bother, my militia can fix that. And judging by the giant cave spider web behind my armorer, it seems my cave is home to giant cave spiders. I wonder how I can trap one so I can begin farming giant cave spider silk.
The militia has been dispatched, but not soon enough to prevent my armorer from meeting a painful death at the hands of an irate sub-human. Soon after, I am alerted with the news that Ingzig Istanmudib the Cheesemaker has been missing for a week. And I have a bluepeacock missing. It's time I do something about that cave.
I also receive happier news, the births of two dwarf babies. Somebody get these two bottles full of dwarven rum before they're eaten by troglodytes.
Overguilds now has an artifact and a legendary metalcrafter. Etnardarud, crafted from bronze and decorated with bands of amethyst. Okay, so I have an incredibly boring artifact. But at least Sigun is a legendary metalcrafter for having made the useless thing. To bad she had to use one of my two bars of metal. And I know the elven caravan that just showed up at the edge of my map won't be bringing any metal either.
Much as I expected, the elves didn't bring me any metal (no surprise there) or even any sunberries. But the pointy-ears weren't totally useless, they did bring me a leopard. I have ordered my animal trainers to train it as a war animal.
Speaking of my animal trainers, I am alarmed to be greeted with the announcement that a giant toad has reverted to a wild state:
On closer inspection, it appears that the giant toad in question is still caged up, so- crisis averted. Right?
A New Yorker, Norman moves his wife and son, Bob into a creepy, run down New England mansion in order to continue his research into the 19th century surgeon Dr Freudstein who's experiments led to him losing his medical license and being banned from the medical profession for life.
Dr Freudstein in his later years.
...And now would be a good time to mention that the creepy run down New England mansion the family moves into is the former home of Doctor Freudstein. And that Norman is actually continuing the research of a colleague of his Dr. Peterson who committed suicide while researching Dr Freudstein experiments. And that there is a history of deaths and disappearances in this house. And that Bob has an "imaginary" friend who tells him to leave the house. And that the basement door is strangely sealed shut. And that Dr. Boyle discovers that Dr Freudstein was never actually buried in the cemetery records say he was... needless to say, if you're familiar at all with the horror genre you should be able to pretty much piece the whole movie together from that. Still this is a really fun and creepy movie.
Bob will save his family from the evil thing in the basement.
This is movie number three in legendary Italian horror director, Lucio Fulci's unofficial Gates of Hell trilogy. Consisting of this movie as well as The City of the Living Dead (1980) and The Beyond (1980). They're not a trilogy in the sense that they share a common continuity, but they are a trilogy in the thematic sense, each of them revolve around a gateway to Hell (these aren't figurative gateways either). And all three of them are super creepy.
If you call yourself a horror fan at all, this one is a must see (as well as much of the rest of Fulci's work, but that's probably a subject for another article).
Ha ha ha. Now I have a well-trained Draltha. I have assigned it to a pasture as I don't want it to starve to death while I train it further. I sure hope that it eats grass in addition to it's normal diet of cavern fungus...
Then comes the Spring migrant wave, bumping my population up to 40. Among this wave is way more rangers than I need and the administrator Ast Momuzilon. He is a great organizer and arrived with his wife and pet bunny. Congratulations Mr. Momuzilon, you are my new manager.
40 Dwarves! How am I gonna manage that?
With my new population boom, I will need alot more living space. I have ordered my woodworkers to start constructing beds, and my miner to start construction on bedrooms.
42 Now! Aarrgghh!!!
As construction of the bedroom wing begins, I hear a report that metalcrafter Sigun Nakuthsazir has been taken by a strange mood and has claimed my recently completed forge. I wonder what Sigun plans on building... Tales From Overguilds, Part One
