Nerd movie review: Zardoz
I was going to do the Expendables, which I saw last week and more or less enjoyed, but the other night at Bad Movie Night at my friend Brian’s house he made us watch Zardoz. Now understand, I am a fan of bad movies that are in 
their own way entertaining for being camp, or surreal, or just badly done with the best intentions, but this is bad on the level of the Star Wars Holiday Special. It is not quite as bad as SWHS, but it is a close second to the worst movie I have ever seen (this Rocky Horror t-shirt, courtesy of the movie t shirt category, is presented as an example of bad movies that are good, so don’t hate spam me).
This film is less like watching a movie and more like being mauled by a pack of wolves and when you drag yourself into the emergency room your treatment involves the doctor punching you in the balls for two hours straight. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking there is some kind of hipster kitsch value in watching it. If you watch this you will feel stupider and less human for the experience. God knows I did.
This movie, bizarrely enough, stars Sean Connery POST JAMES BOND! He should have used his license to kill to take care of his agent on this one. This was after they stopped using him for a couple movies but still, he should have laid off the peyote long enough to actually read the script and realize it would have pissed off PETA if he had lined a bird cage with it, much less tried to act to it. Actually, I’m pretty sure they didn’t have a script for most of the movie and started each day of filming asking the question “OK, what do we feel like filming today?” God I hate the ’70s.
Sean plays Zed, a post-apocalyptic (with remarkably little evidence of any kind of disaster) Brutal (that’s his race, not a descriptive) from the Outlands who spends most of the movie wearing a bright orange loincloth, thigh high brown leather boots, a matching pair safety orange bullet bandoleers, a pony tail, a Texas style handlebar mustache, and an ungodly large amount of chest hair, except of the scene where he wears (no joke) a wedding dress. His acting is pretty wooden, but I really couldn’t judge too accurately as he never had a line that went more than 10 words and spent most of the movie staring into space while the effete upper crust of the future prodded him in the chest. Most of the dialogue was delivered by his girlish dilettante friend named Friend, a hottish (in a ’70s sort of way) woman named Consuela who spent most of the movie trying to get him executed by the annoyingly democratic society but then had a massive and sudden change of heart (similar to a brain aneurysm), fell in love with him and eventually bore him a son, and his only real ally May, the Queen Goddess of Freckles. There is some exposition by Arthur Frayn, who misleads the Brutals by pretending to be the god Zardoz and has a goatee and mustache that was literally drawn on with a Sharpie (again, no joke. Actually, I wish I was joking).
The movie starts off with Arthur’s head floating in space talking to the camera about how he is a magician, immortal, and a god. This is less breaking the 4th wall so much as it is running over it with a Mack truck, then backing up to rape and desecrate it’s corpse. At that point the movie actually gets a little interesting and shows a little promise with a giant stone head floating through the sky, announcing that it is the god Zardoz (SPOILER ALERT-the name Zardoz came from the book The WiZARD of OZ. This is the big revelation that blows Zod’s mind and sets him on the path of deicide. Seriously, the big turning point in his character’s life is finding a childrens novel), and coming up with the one redeeming line from the movie “The Gun is Good. The Penis is Evil. Go Forth and Kill.” The giant head then vomits up hundreds of guns and bullets.
At that point I am thinking “OK, this is kind of interesting. Post apocalyptic religious war. The Road Warrior meets the Passion of the Christ. This has some promise.” Unfortunately, that was the last interesting point in the entire movie. Zod sneaks on board the head, kills Arthur (who later is reborn), lands in the Vortex where an advanced civilization who all have mysterious, ill defined powers and super advanced technology but spend their time grinding grain on a stone grind wheel, is sort of captured, sort of enslaved, sort of experimented on, and is sort of in danger for his life. I really can’t go into the story in any depth at that point as it really is kind of a blur. Somehow all the advanced people are immortal but want to all die, no one has a sex drive any more, the queen of freckles wants to procreate, there is some kind of computer in a crystal that runs everything, Zod is actually some kind of advanced mutant created through selective breeding by Arthur, the old people are kept in a tent in a blatant example of elder abuse, thought crime is punishable by being aged, and everyone is required to do some kind of new age meditation on something called Level 2, but really looks like a hippie freak out session.
Eventually Zod shuts down the force field surrounding the Vortex (did I mention you get to see Sean Connery show off his mime skills?) and his Brutal buddies (also in orange man-kinis and awkward looking Zardoz masks) show up and kill everyone with a serious of brutal summary executions in the most boring action scene of all time. Arthur (Zardoz) resurfaces to claim credit for everything that happened before eating a bullet. By that time I was hoping everyone remotely associated with the movie including the Key Grip and Best Boy would die, so I derived a certain amount of satisfaction from that scene, but it was too little too late. Also, the special effects guy must have had a budget of about $45, as he used at most three squibs during the entire movie. I think they spent all their money on codpieces.
The movie ends with Consuela giving birth to Zods son. He grows up while Zod and Consuela age, die, and decompose into skeletons in a mini montage where they don’t move an inch from a bench. Seeing the credits roll was like getting that first breath of air after being trapped under the ice for 105 minutes. The only difficulty we experienced at that point was resisting the urge to take Brian, the host and architect of pain, out back and beat his ass.
I highly recommend you never see this movie, or mention it in polite company. However, if you want to catch the gist of it without going through the root canal-like agony of watching it I found this Zardoz in 10 minutes clip that really makes about as much sense as the full movie.
