The opening scene is worthy of a rental.
The rest of the film wallows in pseudo existentialist tripe.
Director, John Boorman, wants us to think he is as smart as a futurist Ken Russell, Kubrick or Richard Lester film...Sorry to say he falls way short of all three...
Conclusion:
If your're looking for a confused Sean Connery swathed in a diaper-- spouting Jean Paul Sartre' philosophical crap then, "Zardoz" is your film...
Too bad-- The opening scene is genius...Nice try John Boorman

`Zardoz' was produced, written, and directed by John Boorman who, like Robert Altman (`M.A.S.H') and Ken Russell (`Women In Love') cash in their credit earned from directing very successful commercial films and spend it to direct very personal, very original, and very uncommercial films. `Zardoz' was made right after Boorman's immense critical and commercial success with `Deliverance' and his star in that movie, Burt Reynolds, was to play the lead role in `Zardoz' until Burt fell ill and was replaced with Sean Connery at a cost of 1/5 of the whole million dollar budget. As high as that relative figure may seem, apparently Connery was just finishing up his appearances as James Bond and no one would hire him for anything else, so he needed the money.

While there is a great danger that no one will ever read this review, it is immense fun to write a review of this rich, quirky, and very flawed movie. For starters, I find it easy to see that people have a hard time understanding the movie. I have never held that fact alone against a movie, as it took me at least three viewings of `2001 A Space Odyssey' to feel I was anywhere near understanding it, and `2001' has taken its rightful place among the very best American movies. It has taken me at least that many viewings to understand some of Fredrico Fellini's movies and I still don't understand `8½'. But that doesn't mean this is not a great movie. But that doesn't mean this is a great movie. It only means it has potential the fact that it can still be found on the store shelves is a testament to the fact that this movie has a lot to offer, even if it ultimately does not fully realize the filmmaker's vision.

There are few movies I have seen which are more in need of the director's commentary than this one. One of Boorman's most telling observations on this commentary is the statement that there may just be too much being attempted in this movie. And, I think this summarizes the problem in a nutshell.

Like all true science fiction works, the heart of `Zardoz' is to set the stage by imagining `what would happen if this statement were true'? The central premise of the movie is the fact that some cataclysm destroyed the world as we know it and, not unlike H. G. Wells' `The Time Machine', humankind has split into two major subspecies, one of which is effectively immortal and the other barely survives on a subsistence level and who treat an artifact of the immortals as a god named `Zardoz'. In addition to being immortal, the higher level beings can communicate telepathically and can control lower level beings by the force of mind alone.

Some of the implications the filmmaker draws from this central premise are truly inspired. By far the most brilliant is the inference that the immortals can suffer from debilitating boredom. To imagine how easy this can happen, just imagine a conventional image of heaven where the primary activities are singing and playing an archaic musical instrument.

Another inspired implication is the fact that the immortals are punished by being aged a certain number of years, so that when they are treated to restore their youth, they never grow any younger than their penal age. These two implications lead to two subgroups. These are immortals who become totally immobilized by ennui and immortals who age to the point of debilitation. If the movie stopped there, it could probably have easily filled its two hours with a rich explication of all these suppositions.

The problem is that to make the story interesting, the storyteller must bring a mortal into the immortals' world to shake things up. The problem I have with the device Boorman uses to bring Connery's mortal character into the immortals' world really doesn't seem to work very well. This element of the story all revolves around the premise that the mortals are being suppressed by a myth based on the story of the Wizard of Oz. This myth is so central to the story that the title of the movie and the name of the deity itself comes from a contraction of `wiZARD of OZ'. Connery's character, `Zed', with the help of his fellow mortal `brutals' manages to get aboard the great stone head which embodies Zardoz' after Zed discovers the fact that the great and mighty `Zardoz' is, like the fictional wizard, a sham. My biggest problem is that the analogy between this future earth and the Land of Oz is very, very thin. There is no explanation I can fathom for why the mortals are divided into two classes, one of which, the `brutals' like Zed spend all their time, catching, raping, and killing the other mortal class. This situation remits somewhat when we see the brutals acting as overseers while the other mortals spend time planting crops, but this subplot is simply not very well developed.

The primary thread of the story is in the contention between two immortals over what to do with Zed. The `scientist' who wishes to study Zed wins a vote to keep him alive for 21 days. In the course of this period, Zed manages to stir up the world of the immortals and do a lot to bring some real interest to their life.

As the movie was done very cheaply in the early 1970's, today's computer based effects simply did not exist and the `on camera' effects are a bit threadbare, not unlike the curtain behind which the Midwestern huckster manipulates the image of the Wizard of Oz. And yet this does not detract from the movie. The film mostly suffers from too much implausibility and, to paraphrase the Austrian Emperor's comments on Mozart's music in `Amadeus', there are `simply too many ideas'.

An yet, this is a really worthwhile movie to see, enhanced by medieval music expert David Munro's score.

Movie: *1/2 DVD Quality: ***1/2 DVD Extras: **

The first five minutes of "Zardoz" promise a lot of campy fun as a giant stone head flies through the sky, then lands as a voice intones, "The penis is evil." Shortly thereafter, Sean Connery shows up sporting a huge Fu Manchu moustache and a waist-length ponytail, clothed in a bikini bottom and hip boots, and the audience knows it is in for a good time in the vein of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" or "Flesh Gordon". But as the movie drones on, it all too soon becomes apparent that this nonsense is supposed to be taken seriously as science fiction and even purports to have A Deeper Cosmic Meaning ... that no one is meant to laugh when Mr. Connery appears in drag as a bride, or fights his way out of a giant plastic Baggie. A very, v-e-r-y l-o-n-g 106 minutes passes before the end title flashes across the screen, leaving the audience to ponder the eternal question, "Huh?"

The only aspect of the movie that comes off as intended are the art direction and cinematography. John Boorman films are typically a feast for the eyes, and "Zardoz" is no exception. The rest of the film is negligible. The script, the performances, the music, the editing, the direction ... everything is subpar. The Fox DVD offers an acceptable transfer of the film, with generally clear sound and crisp video. The DVD extras are so-so; director John Boorman's commentary is interesting and helpful in terms of trying to interpret what's happening in the narrative, but the Stills Gallery is small and uninteresting, and the Theatrical Trailer and Radio Spots are as silly as the film itself. Not particularly recommended, not even for those who tend to enjoy really bad movies for the comic value.

Take John Boorman, fresh from an incredible artistic and cinematic masterpiece ("Deliverance"). Stir in a sci-fi concept quite worthy of Stanislaw Lem: that humanity has developed the technology to explore the secrets of the universe, but has not developed the corresponding capability to understand the results, and retreats perforce like a clam into its shell. And what do you get: something that is arguably warped genius or juvenile trash.

As much as I acknowledge this movie to be a masterpiece of bipolarity, every decade or so I have to revisit it in order to remind myself why I believe it to be so truly awful. And every time I see it, the more banalities I see that make me cry aloud in anguish.

"Cheese" doesn't do it justice. "Fatuous" doesn't do it justice. How about "incredibly overblown, overly back-projected, over-planktonic (if you see it, you'll understand), over-breasted, cheaply-costumed, conceited, microsatirical, mercaptanesque, cinematic flatulence, a rhizoidal, festuring mass of curdling queso on a cross"? Even that description falls pathetically short of ... this ineffable work, worthy only of sheer amazement at its audacity. This is a self-referential (read: self-congratulatory) movie aimed at the very people who are capable of getting a bit of a chuckle out of it (and I must confess that I did at times). Yet I feel compelled to point out that "Zabriskie Point" and "Plan 9 from Outer Space" were made on significantly smaller budgets.

The details are too painful to recall. Just heed my warning: DO NOT BUY IT. Rent it if you must, to satisfy the curiosity that kills you. Rent it again, an iterative ten years later, as I do, out of sheer masochistic ritual. But whatever you do, do not be caught dead with it.

Zardoz (John Boorman, 1974)

Poor John Boorman. In 1974, he was on top of the world. He'd delivered (no pun intended) Deliverance two years previous, and it was not only a critical success, but a box-office success as well. And it got him nominated for Best Director and Best Picture. Yep, John Boorman was someone in Hollywood.

Then came Zardoz.

Zardoz is not a film so much as it is a bad erotic dream that happens after taking a good deal of LSD. The psyche of the dreamer seems to involve a good deal of leather fetishism, a fondness for orgies, some well-repressed rape fantasy, and, well, a thing for stone heads.

Zed (Sean Connery) is an Exterminator for the god Zardoz, tasked with the job of hunting down and killing "brutals" (i.e., other humans). Zardoz' opening monologue explaining this to the viewer (for, obviously, the exterminators are already aware of this philosophy, else they wouldn't be exterminators) is absolutely hysterical, and must be heard to be believed. (Those without a strong stomach can hear it sampled, in its entirety, on Terror Organ's Buzzbomb CD.) We cut, and very badly mind you, to a shot of Zed emerging from a pile of something inside the stone head, which transports him (after certain minor adventures) to the Vortex, where Zardoz lives. Zed must explore the world of the Vortex, and adapt to life there, and the life in the Vortex must adapt to him.

Comparisons are made to most of the usual suspects (all contemporary science fiction films, of course, most notably Rollerball), but what I was reminded of more often than not was John Frankenheimer's brilliant picture of a decade previous, Seconds. Except that Seconds made a good deal more sense, but didn't have anywhere near as much nudity.

There are some decent performances at times, but no one here stays at a top level throughout. The closest actor to achieving that is John Alderton (recently seen in Calendar Girls), who plays his role with a kind of cynical amusement. The other two main characters are played by Charlotte Rampling (Swimming Pool, The Statement) and Sara Kestelman (Invasion: Earth) as a pair of women who can't agree on what should be done with Zed. Which is all well and good, until close to the climax, when Boorman (who also wrote the script) seems to get the two mixed up. From there, things break down rather rapidly from what was already a pretty precarious position.

There are certainly worse movies out there. (If you want to see a real science fiction howler, check out the filmed version of Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme; I think everyone on that set, not just the director, had gotten some excellent LSD.) But there are also many thousands that are far better. Zardoz is a curiosity, a film that attempts to invest fevre dreams with great meaning. It's been done far better. **