October 18, 2003

If you need a reason to avoid this movie consider that Sean Connery has a scene in which he dons a wedding dress.

Let's face it, If you work in movies for six decades and make over 100 films then it is inevitable that you are going to have a stain on your resume. Such is the case for Sean Connery whose film nadir is John Boorman's Zardoz a long, painful, boring journey with the former Mr. Bond parading around in a red diaper (reason #2 to avoid it).

What puzzles me is that this is the film that Connery fell into immediately after departing the role of James Bond. How does he follow up such worldwide fame? By traipsing around the distant future in a red diaper. That's how.

Oh my dear lord in Heaven, where to begin describing Zardoz . . .

The year is 2293 and the inhabitants of the earth crawl around like apes and occasionally fall on their knees to worship a giant floating stone head. Zardoz is it's name and it hangs around, spews forth some convoluted wisdom about guns and penises and then vomits rifles down on it's subjects.

But stick around, it gets worse.

As if this isn't complicated enough, we have to suffer through a half-assed explanation of the confusing events described above. It seems that Zardoz has been working on a plot to keep the "Brutals" from being fruitful and multiplying. To keep their numbers small, a band of banditos known as Exterminators steal Zardoz's guns and kill the Brutals. Why the Brutals don't just take the guns and fight back is beyond me.

After about six weeks of those scenes we finally get to Zed (guess who) who decides to hop aboard the giant stone head and see what's up. Inside he finds that Zardoz isn't a god but a rather complicated spaceship. Once he does away with the pilot, Zed enters a vortex where lives the ruling class who seem to be holding a never-ending Victoria's Secret convention. They call themself The Eternals and because this is 1973, I halfway expected to find them accompanying David Bowie and was a little stunned when a guy named Egg showed up looking like the holy mutation of Bowie and Keith Richards *shudder* and as scary as he looks, you can bet that in a movie this bad the camera is going to linger on him for long periods of time

Okay that makes up the first 30 minutes of Zardoz and what comes in the last 90 minutes will be filtered through channel surfing. That being that even the those with a long-lasting attention span will find themselves waning once you realize what a convoluted pile of sheep dip Zardoz will turn out to be.

In the latter half of the movie there's some business about Zed being a super-mutant and some rigmarole about him being the last hope to save mankind or something like that. Then there is some strange fumblings about how if you're immortal that means your impotent. I dunno, I was switching the TV back and forth between this and Battlebots and there was some dialogue like "The voice of the turtle is heard in the land". After that I just didn't want to hear anymore.