The Greatest Movie EVER
Posted by Caitlin on January 16, 2006
So there I was, slumming it up Texas style in a Salt Lake City bar, listening to perhaps the WORST rockabilly band yet formed (although to be fair to the genre, that might make them one of the better acts) and working hard to get to the bottom of my Hefeweisen. As I sat in a dirty, badly stuffed armchair, I began to feel a significant pain in my arm, but before I could panic I realized it was just my doesn't-know-his-own-strength boyfriend smacking me to gain my attention as he used his free hand to point emphatically towards a t.v. monitor above the bar that seemed about to put him in a seizure of excitement.
Now, in my mind (or as far as every celebrity-drenched magazine on the planet has been able to convince me) Sean Connery is an A-list actor (I'll forgive him for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but only because of Indiana Jones). He's the original Bond, the Oscar winner, owner of one of the most readily distinguishable voices in Hollywood, and let's not forget: the lady killer.
Even now at 75 years of age, he instills women everywhere with the carnal urge to drop swiftly kneeward.
It's because of these expectations that I immediately felt far more inebriated than beer alone can make a person when I realized that the Burt Reynolds atrocity that had been prancing around with a pink plastic mask on his head for twenty full minutes was actually a flagitious befoulment of one of the most treasured members of the entertainment world.
Sweet readers, I give you:
This movie's plot, the "special" effects, the acting, are all absolutely fucking horrible, but the magic of ZARDOZ is that people agreed to make this thing anyway. I wonder why during the making of this film, nobody thought to stop and ask, "Are we really doing this? Can we stop now?", but I doubt that any facet of this jewel was rendered while the people involved were sober (the director had just made the film Deliverance, though, so I guess he had a few problems already).
So first of all, THIS GUY'S name is Zed:
It's like Rambo, Seagal, and the CGI dancing baby all mixed their sperm together with a few clippings from Magnum PI's rowdy 'stache and impregnated Cher.
You tell me why anyone would NOT want to see Sean Connery with a braid, red diaper, MATCHING bullet casings, and THIGH HIGH BOOTS (fabulous!). Zed is a caveman-ish guy who lives in a chaotic society of people who kill people and people who plant crops. This is a realm of death and rape (Sean rapes like 3 people in this movie) and other nasty oogy-boogies that is kept in control by use of trickery on the part of the "Immortals" who make up the counter-culture and live in a bubble of Utopia and can't die (hence their name).
Now, I'm going to type this out, and you will read it, and you won't believe me, but I swear it is absolutely, truly the opening scene to this movie. There's a bunch of people like Zed riding around and some other people screaming and then A GIGANTIC FLYING STONE HEAD flies to the ground and says:
"The gun is GOOD. The PENIS IS EVIL. THE PENIS SHOOTS SEEDS."
Then it vomits hundreds of guns and bullets onto the ground and flies away.
Zed hides inside of it and kills the owner who we later discover is a member of the Immortals who was chosen to control the "Brutals" which we find out is Zed's people. The head takes Zed to "THE VORTEX" where the Immortals live. He, uh, penetrated the bubble, and apparently it's a big deal.
A really freckly woman who refuses to cover her boobs up zaps him with her brain and brings him to a meeting where all the Immortals watch his thoughts on BIG SCREEN!
WE ARE THE FUTURE! T.V. HAS NO SHAPE.
The cool part here is how all the Immortals start to get excited when Zed shows his memories, narrated in third person, about how he rode down a woman on the beach Comanche style, and then rapes the crap out of her while wearing a smaller plastic replica of the GIGANTIC FLYING STONE HEAD as a helmet. So not only will we all live forever eventually, but we'll be sexually frustrated perverts, too. They even show him a video of female mud wrestlers to supposedly do a scientific experiment involving erections and what causes them. One lady hates him for his woody and some of the others start touching him. I think he licks a dude's hand at one point, but that's hardly weird compared to everything else in the movie.
Now the movie tries to reveal why being immortal and living in a utopia isn't all it's cracked up to be. Everyone is telepathic so if you think bad thoughts you will be forced to age into senility and wear tuxedos and dresses while dancing to some Good Ol' Oldies for the rest of eternity. Even worse: Our beloved James Bond pulls around a rickshaw full of bread and a guy who looks like the original Willy Wonka.
Then he has to feed the people that thought bad thoughts and the also shunned members of Immortal society that just got so bored with everything that they became "Apathetics". They don't move or talk or react so Zed tries to force feed some and then tries to rape one while Willy Wonka eggs him on, but when he doesn't hear screaming he throws her like a football across the room.
I bet you can squeal like a pig!
This is the part of the movie where it manages to be amusingly fucked beyond belief and pretentious and boring all at the same time.
Just keep watching, because the best is yet to come.
You'll see Sean Connery in a wedding dress, destroying a "Tabernacle" which previously went without mention but serves as the source for all the Immortals' power, more nipples than a soft porn, and even more bizarre is the absolutely out of nowhere change in his relationship with this chick:
I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHY I LOVE YOU!
First she tries to kill him for having a stiff wiener and then once he starts murdering everyone apparently she decides she's completely in love with him (smart girl). You also get to see her boobs a lot, which is fun.
From here on out it becomes an unexplainable shit-storm of bizarre events that ends the movie pretty awkwardly.
Overall, there is a reason you never heard of this movie. I'm sure the studio was dropping hideous amounts of acid just to forget they were making it, and the only people that enjoyed it in the 70's were those who were dropping equivalent amounts while viewing. I'm not advocating that you take drugs before seeing it, because honestly you don't really need any. There's a lot of the 70's influence apparent and the retarded philisophical questions that are posed are ridiculous (IF WE ALL LIVED FOREVER BUT HAD TO LIVE IN A BUBBLE WE'D STOP HAVING SEX AND WE'D BE SO SAAADDD) and best to be ignored, like a hobo spouting drunken diatribes on the corner. There are a lot of parts in the movie where it seems like the director called "cut" and then they all forgot what they were doing and just started making it up. I can imagine a mind-blown "dude" who smokes so much weed that his friends all call him "The Gas Chamber" writing it, and maybe the guy that cleared this movie was contact high from reading the manuscript, but despite the fact that it's obviously a bunch of bunk, this movie will go well in your collection in between Flash Gordon and Army of Darkness, I'm sure.
A small warning: after watching this movie you might feel as if you've been raped or drugged heavily with a strong hallucinogen, but don't worry, you're only under the influence of the 70's.
Sometimes that might feel weird, but...
There's no way this would give you nightmares.
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