Release Date: February 6, 1974
Director: Jon Boorman
Starring: Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, John Alderton, Niall Buggy
Favorite quote: “The penis is evil!” – Zardoz
I haven’t don’t this shtick in a while, so I figured I’d restart it by going full WTF.
Imagine a movie that is more philosophically pretentious than the Matrix trilogy and has a premise that is more batshit insane than The Village. Imagine that that movie is so confounding that the studio demands that an introduction explaining what the hell is going on be added. Now imagine that movie stars Sean Connery.
That movie, ladies and gents, is the 1974 movie Zardoz. It’s a movie Connery took to avoid being typecast as a suave action star – because that’s evidently a bad thing. It’s a movie that thoroughly confused and angered moviegoers when it debuted. And it is a movie that HAS to be seen to be believed. You may or may not understand it, but trust me, you need to see this!
I mean, look at that quote I singled out above. It’s said in a serious tone. How can you NOT see a movie that utters that sentence in a serious tone?
The movie is set in the year 2253. Connery is Zed, a member of a tribe of Brutals who worship Zardoz, a floating head-god thing. The tribesmen saunter about wearing odd red shorts with suspenders with nothing under and black pirate boots. I’m sure many people have come across one particular picture of Connery and wondered what in the name of Jesus Roller-skating Christ they were seeing.
Well, that’s from this movie. Drink it in!
The tribesmen are told by Zardoz to kill other Brutals, who are regular people who don’t believe. To this end, Zardoz provides them with firearms while spouting the most known quote of this movie: “The gun is good!” So it’s a tribe of oddly-dressed gun nuts. And this is in the UK.
After an opening sequence which ends with Zed shooting the audience and the opening credits, we find Zed inside Zardoz’s mouth. Along with him are some nude people encased in shrink-wrap. The whole shrink-wrapped naked people thing is a motif that you see later. A moving figure startles Zed, who reacts like all in his tribe do: by shooting. He ends up hitting Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy), the exposition-dumping dude we see in the very beginning and the supposed controller of the Zardoz head. He flies out of the Godhead’s mouth and the Godhead subsequently falls from the sky. Apparently, god-heads don’t have auto-pilot in 2253.
After the Zardoz head crashes, Zed exits and finds a village inhabited by the Eternals, a civilization of immortal people who alone hold the combined achievements of mankind. It turns out that the Eternals are the ones who created Zardoz as a way of intimidating and controlling the Brutals. When he is captured by two female Eternals, May (Sara Kestelman) and Consuela (Charlotte Rampling), he interns with them and eventually learns of the false god and its origin.
To go farther into Zardoz’s convoluted and pretentious plot is to try to explain fairies and unicorns. I mean, I kinda know what’s going on, but getting a reader to understand it is beyond my abilities. I’ll just say that there is a lot of pantomiming, a lot of religious symbolism, and a whole heaping hell of a lot of nudity.
During his quest to understand the Eternals and why they created Zardoz, he is befriended by a man whose name is literally Friend (John Alderton), who explains their civilization. May and Consuela also fill in some blanks, and Arthur Frayn reappears, uninjured, to fill in more blanks. This eventually leads to the origin of Zardoz, which is so ridiculous that I can’t even muster the strength to spoil it. When you get to that part, you will audibly groan.
In fact, most of the viewing will be peppered with groans. There are lots of unbelievable things in Zardoz, including seeing Sean Connery actually MIMING certain actions! But for me at least, there was an odd appreciation for all the nonsense I was seeing. There’s something satisfying about seeing a bunch of grown people spouting pretentious drivel in a serious manner that I find interesting. The expository intro kind of ruins the discovery of what exactly they’re trying to get across in the movie, but it doesn’t dull my desire to watch the train wreck unfold.
And believe me, this movie is a train wreck, complete with the exploding tanker cars and NTSB response. Still, I think it’s one of those “guys’ night” travesties that can be appreciated with friends and prodigious amounts of liquor or cannabis. Just don’t start any drinking games where you take a shot every time something makes no sense. If you do, there will be casualties.
