Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka I Padroni del Mondo, aka Master of the World

• Written and directed by Alberto Cavallone
• Starring
  • Sven Kruger
  • Sasha D’Arc
  • Viviana Maria Rispole
  • Maria Vittoria Garlanda
  • Aldo Sambrell

With Italian exploitation and ripoff cinema, it’s very dangerous to point at something and say, “There is the nadir of filmmaking quality.” But Conqueror of the World comes as close to the bottom of the barrel as I ever hope to see out of those doughty Italians. It’s an obvious hanger-on to Quest For Fire (1981), minus the actual quest for fire. Also missing is the linguistic creativity and the cultural inventiveness. The viewer also searches in vain for any sort of plot structure, pacing, musical acumen, cinematographical skill, or… In fact, this movie falls below minimum standards of competence in every area. Aside from that, it’s just like Quest For Fire.

The film begins with a narrative introduction that was obviously tacked on after the fact to try to make some sense of what is to come. (It’s the same band-aid strategy used on Zardoz (1974), and meets here with similar success.) Everything we are about to see took place two hundred thousand years ago, when man worshiped the bear as a god. It’s not a terribly lucid preamble, but it’s the last coherent thought we’ll get for the next ninety minutes.

NeanderDude and his one expression.

There is, apparently, one caveman tribe with a bear head that they worship. They keep it at the front of a cave, with one sleepy person to guard it (while another of his tribe fingerpaints on the rocks out of sight — and where did he get the bright blue pigment?). The hunting party of another tribe creeps up on the cave, kills the two guards, beheads them, and takes the bear head and the human heads back to their camp, where they chop open the [latex replicas barely resembling the] human heads and chow down on the brains. This is accompanied by dialog which goes like this: “Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!”

A beetlebrowed female from the tribe that lost the bear head (I dubbed her “the NeanderBabe” — I had to give just about everyone a nickname, because personal names are nonexistent) discovers the slaughter and theft, and raises the alarm with her tribe using the whiny feminine equivalent of the dialog above: “Enh! Enh! Enh!” Her tribe is governed by the most authentically Neanderthalish performer in this movie; I dub him “the NeanderDude.”

NeanderBabe demonstrates why beer goggles were invented.

Meanwhile, the larcenous tribe has finished their brunch of brains, and wants to move on to the next course: a blond fellow tied to a stake. I think we’re supposed to understand that this is a Cro-Magnon, whereas the others are all Neanderthals, but the clues are somewhat scanty. Yes, there are a few browridge appliances to be had scattered around the other performers — they’re expensive, so not everyone gets them — but there are no other distinctions like hair color (the various tribes are each a mix of dark and medium-brown hair) or length, clothing styles (everyone wears random fur wraps), or signs of intelligence. As the tribe moves to untie the Cro-Magnon, a pack of “wolves” “attacks” (which really means that a few German Shepherds come to play), and in the confusion, Cro-Magnon gets away.

He’s injured, though, so he falls down in a dead faint, right where NeanderDude’s posse can find him. NeanderDude is ready to kill him out of xenophobia, but NeanderBabe takes a sudden liking to him, and covers her body with his own. NeanderDude gives up and leaves the two of them there, where NeanderBabe starts a fire and begins to nurse him back to health. That’s right, everyone in this movie can make fire at the drop of a hat, but no one has any grasp of language. It’s all, “Ugh ugh enh ugh enh!”

“Now it’s my turn to lead!”

Except for the Cro-Magnon. As he rouses, he tries to speak to her, but since neither she nor we can understand a lick of what he’s saying, he soon gives up. They start wandering and come across a party from yet another tribe, which attacks mainly because it can. But then they meet… a bear! Remember how I said that bears are sacred? Cro-Magnon slips past the bear, which “attacks” and “kills” the leader of the party (more like “dances with,” but whatever). The other members of the party then bow to the Cro-Magnon, because obviously the bear favors him, and invite him and NeanderBabe back to their cave.

In between all of this, we also keep returning to NeanderDude and his posse. NeanderDude is a louse, even by paleolithic standards; he kills whoever he comes across, and isn’t above using friendly deception so that strangers will lower their guard. And when the camera isn’t pointing at the Cro-Magnon or NeanderDude, we get a screenful of nature documentary footage, at least fifteen years older than the movie judging from the way the film has faded: herons, other brown bears, hawks and vultures, deer… Nothing currently extinct, of course. There isn’t enough in the budget to dress a circus elephant up in carpet remnants.

You can almost hear the Star Trek fight music, can’t you? Da da dah dah dah dah dah…

The Cro-Magnon and NeanderBabe stay only a short time with the tribe that adopts them, because one of the other women there takes a hankering to the Cro-Magnon and incites jealousy in what had previously been her mate. So the threesome (mrowr!) gets back to wandering, with a wee bit of competition between the females on who can feed and serve their hunky male.

Ready for the high point of the movie? It comes at the forty-four-minute mark, when the Cro-Magnon tries to teach NeanderBabe his name. It’s “Bog.” Wow. The only name that was going to appear in the entire screenplay, and that’s the best they could come up with? Not that it matters; NeanderBabe can’t even wrap her mind around the concept of a personal name, so she just chants the sound, “Bah bah bah…” like an idiot. At least it’s better than “Enh enh enh.” (That means I can also assign one cast member to his role. It’s Sven Kruger.)

Bog, pretty boy of the Pleistocene.

And there’s more wandering, and they encounter what may be other tribes or tribes they’ve already met (everyone dresses alike, so it’s hard to tell), and people meet bears, and Bog invents the bolo, and there’s more brain-eating cannibalism, and there’s some intrigue regarding the bear head, which now belongs to the tribe that took them in until Third Wheel Girl started making eyes at Bog. Eventually, I stopped trying to follow the plot even minimally, and simply started waiting for it to end. It wasn’t just a passive wait on my part, either; the musical score was, inexplicably, a repetitive riff of electronica, which fit the movie about as well as Pixie Stix fits with a T-bone steak.

There comes a point in a movie such as this one in which you realize that a species that has risen from humble beginnings to great pinnacles of achievement, only to put together a movie like this one, hasn’t really learned much at all.

(Note: Writer/director Alberto Cavallone’s next, and final, project was a contribution to the screenplay for Ironmaster (1983) — another prehistoric epic which manages to be a lot more fun than this one, if no smarter.)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 25, plus 1 bear
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0