"Zardoz"

[RMeingast]

Just noticed this old Sir Sean flick being aired by TCM at 2:00 a.m. March 22:

http://www.tcm.com/underground/article.html?oid=225856

 

Very fun movie to watch for various reasons... A "bad movie" that's fun to watch, I guess you could say...

Always liked how the famous second movement (Allegretto) of Beethoven's 7th Symphony is used in the film... Worth watching just to listen to it...

Haven't seen the film on TV in years...

 

Trailer with Allegretto at end:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr4T_0X3efc

 

For those who haven't seen the movie, don't want to give away the meaning of the film's title (so beware spoilers):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz

[SansFin]

I like this movie very much!

 

I have found that that statement often is met with derision. I believe that reaction is a good thing because it has been my experience that those who are quick to belittle that opinion are marking themself as a person who believes that their personal taste should dictate what others watch. Those people have taken a step towards being plonked because I have no time to waste with such fools.

 

I believe that this movie is worth watching if for no reason other than the scenes of Sean Connery in a thong!

 

I find that it works on so very many levels. It can be seen as a take-off of campy 1950s sci-fi movies. It can be seen as simultaneously auxesis and meiosis of social divides as it demonstrates the heights which civilized people can reach when unencumbered by the lower classes and it demonstrates how people in all classes have the same base nature. It is both a surreal allegory and a neat action-adventure flick.

 

I feel that this is one of those movies which fall into the "love it or hate it" camp with few people finding it just okay.

[RMeingast]

Yes, people love it or hate it:

 

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/zardoz/

 

I like it for certain things (music by David Munrow for one), but don't take it too seriously in general...

 

Roger Ebert gave it a positive review:

 

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/zardoz-1974

 

Channel 4 in Britain calls it the "finest film" by director John Boorman:

 

http://www.film4.com/reviews/1973/zardoz

 

The Channel 4 review is copied below as it's partially hidden at the website:

 

"Boorman's finest film is a wonderfully eccentric and visually exciting sci-fi quest. It also affords the spectacle of Sean Connery in a red nappy, knee-high leather boots, pony tail and Zapata moustache.

 

For many years, Zed (Connery) and his band of Exterminators have rode the wastelands of Earth, killing and **** their genetic inferiors, at the behest of Zardoz, a giant floating stone head. The decades of brutal Darwinian development have gifted Zed with an uncommon intelligence, and one day he decides to investigate Zardoz.

 

Stowed away inside the stone head, he is flown to an isolated community of immortals, discovering that what he presumed was a god is infact merely the work of one of the community's scientists. Before he can fully process this shock, Zed is sucked into the decadent dinner party ways of this bourgeois gang (known as the Vortex), who have been rendered immortal by science, but also impotent from sheer boredom.

 

Zed's rude aggression and alarming potency is demonstrated in one howler of a scene. Vortex leader Consuella (Rampling) shows Zed old sex films (two women mud wrestling, more performance art than porno) and he fails to get wood. It is only when he casts his eyes over her fragrancy that his **** stands briskly to attention, garnering amazed looks and amused titters from the other Eternals, none of whom have seen a hard-on for a thousand years.

 

Only at the **** end of the 1960s could such a simultaneously ambitious and preposterous movie be made. Boorman's thesis - that the middle class hippies cannot retreat to their own bohemian idyll without descending into in-fighting and impotency - draws both from H.G. Wells' 'Time Machine', and no doubt his own observation of the Sixties communes. The film's closing massacre of the beautiful people is a dark echo of Charles Manson's killing of Sharon Tate in the Hollywood hills, with hairsute ubermensch Zed bearing considerable resemblance to the bearded madness that was Manson.

 

It's fair to say that Boorman is not fully in control of his material here. Rather he has stuck a few big wriggling ideas in a bag and just let them get on with it. And therein lies the allure of Zardoz, a one-off in the annals of sci-fi, directed with a wild-eyed associative imagination that would not survive a single minute in a test-screening."

[ValentineXavier]

I love *Zardoz,* I love John Boorman, I even like the Channel Four review. But, I must take exception to their statement that it is his finest film. This is the man who made *Point Blank,* *Deliverance,* *Excalibur,* and several other great films.