Review: Zardoz (1974)

You know, I’ve mentioned before that the 1970s remains a fascinating era of filmmaking for me, especially as far as the west goes. In an interim period between the old and the new, when studios rose and fell, when young directors had some room to try out genre-pushing ideas that would define whole generations, we had room for all sorts of innovative titles discussed today. 

This isn’t one of them. This is something that John Boorman came up with while probably wasted on enough drugs of the era that he planned the screenplay with a potted plant. This is something that lives in infamy among the deranged circles of cult film fans. This is a film that dares to ask you how much you want to see a hairy half-naked Scotsman dance around pseudophilosophical scifi rambling…and gives it to you whether you want to or not. Here’s my take on Zardoz!

Very early on, we get buffeted in the face by the film’s most iconic elements…such as they are. Before anything, we get a weird, pretentious intro from a man wearing boxers on his head with a literal drawn-on mustche, trying to assure us this all satirical in some way. Then, we get something about masked men in, er, male lingerie I think, prancing around a desolate countryside until a giant floating stone head arrives and vomits up guns for them. It then intones about how ‘the gun is good’ and the ‘penis is evil’. Why, no, that’s not in fact a militant screed from Valerie Solanas. It’s…something at any rate. You may try to unpack this, but you’ll likely be distracted by Sean Connery dressed up like…this.

"I'm...too schexy for my shirt...scho schexy it...hurtsch..."

After a confusing turn of events, Stupid Sexy Sean ends up on said giant floating head, which some think looks like Karl Marx, and interpret as some other political commentary that Boorman may or may not have gotten from his talking flowerpot. Anyhoo, it turns out Connery here is Zed, part of a group of marauders indirectly controlled by an enclave of immortal elites living apart from this bizarre post-apocalyptic world in what looks like an otherwise quaint English village. There, an understandably confused Zed ends up jostling between different factions of these Eternals, some of whom wish an upheaval from their existence in drab immortality. 

"You see, when I wear my drawers like a hat, it deeply symbolizes the connection between man and pyjamas, and...er...stop laughing!" 

Honestly, there is something going on here between all the weirdness. You can talk about themes of dependency on technology and the lack of true stimulation, or how isolated communities inevitably turn on each other when bereft of any true struggle. You can even talk about class contrasts and the self-determination thereof. 

Or we can talk about how you’re way more likely to be focused on the very protracted scene where a bunch of Eternals psychically wibble someone else to death by stretching out their arms and making weird noises! Because you sure as hell not going to be thinking about anything deep when all that is going on!

Things become even more of a semi-coherent acid trip later on, when Zed enters the inside of some sort of ‘Tabernacle’ that is some sort of AI computer as designed by Andy Warhol following a decade of deranged living in a paint factory. We get multiple twists that seemingly just try to exist the film’s title, and then it all ends as the eternal society comes crashing down for everyone to die. After all the mumbling about immortality, it turns out that all you need to do is just shoot people and then just shrug and move on. Hooray for deep resolutions! 

I mean, I’ll say this, it’s certainly memorable. It’s not as unwatchable as Boorman’s later train wreck Exorcist II either. This represented some kind of id hooped up on seventies hallucinogenics and let loose, and is interesting that sense. And as Sean Connery’s attempts to branch beyond James Bond…well, it’s no Highlander, but I guess it was daring in some sense. But obviously this is only recommendable to anyone who wants a particularly off-kilter piece for a bad movie night, or just is obsessed with seeking out weirdness from the best era to provide that!