More than any film I’ve yet reviewed for this site, Zardoz boggles the mind and provokes the question: What in the holy ding-dong hell did I just watch? For 100 minutes, John Boorman’s hedonistic opus barrels along like the kind of maddening fever dream one might have after over-indulging in bad Thai food and worm-based tequila. It’s atrocious and incoherent–a vanity project gone completely off the rails.
And yet, Zardoz is so stunningly awful, it takes on a strange, gruesome watchability. With this experience behind me, I can now confirm two things about the film: It’s never predictable, and it’s never boring. That’s not a recommendation, just a telling indication of this movie’s unabashed weirdness. Zardoz stands unique in the history of bad cinema. Yes, it’s terrible. But it also has flickers of intelligence and craftsmanship. Yes, it’s a failure. But at least it’s an ambitious one.
Before I describe the film’s “plot,” let me slap a disclaimer here: Nothing you’re about to read is made up. Someone actually wrote and filmed all of this: It’s the year 2293, or whatever. Most of the world has become a grimy, desolate mudscape right out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (Indeed, if Eric Idle and John Cleese had traipsed through a scene clopping coconuts together, I’d have added two full stars to this review.)
In this ugly husk of a future, humanity falls under the rule of Zardoz, a floating head-shaped idol who vomits rifles and shotguns and issues edicts such as: “The gun is good. The penis is evil.” Go ahead and read those sentences again if need be. Zardoz is worshipped by the Brutals, a primitive caste of hunter-gatherers forced to round up resources for the Eternals. These pampered immortals live in a mysterious cult compound called the Vortex.
As the film opens, we meet Zed (Sean Connery). Dressed in a skimpy, woolen man-kini and adorned with a tight Linda Ronstadt wig, Zed looks like Barbarella re-imagined as a brawny, hairy Scotsman. Just Google it and you’ll understand. Anyway, ol’ Zed wakes up inside the Zardoz head, without a clue how he got there. Groggy and confused, Zed tries to make sense of the strangeness around him: Naked, unconscious men and women are all around, their bodies wrapped in clear plastic. We also see piles of fresh grain, stacks of loaded machine guns, and a mysterious wizard screaming gibberish. If all this seems indulgent and off-putting, well…it absolutely is.
Compared to what follows, however, this gonzo beginning is just the tip of the tentacle. It seems that Zed escapes the dry-heaving stone god and wanders into the Vortex. He finds a cult of effete, pretentious layabouts, long suffering from the curse of immortality. The absence of death has robbed their lives of meaning. Sexual reproduction has long vanished, as has any ambition and drive. This insular inertia has many Eternals craving the emotional and spiritual release that can only come with death.
See? There are some compelling ideas buried underneath the film’s abject goofiness. For a few isolated moments, Zardoz threatens to wander out of the weeds and start giving us a coherent story. Alas, ’twas not to be. Boorman spends most of the film’s midsection wallowing between heavy-handed allegory and soft-core porn. The result is an ungainly patchwork of disjointed scenes that shouldn’t exist but do. For example, a symposium of Eternal intellectuals attempt to provoke Zed into getting a boner by showing him mud-wrasslin’ women. In another, elderly nursing home residents, dressed in tuxes and ballgowns, attempt to flog Connery with their canes and walkers. Finally, the action beat where Zed escapes an angry mob by disguising himself in a gorgeous, flowing wedding dress must be seen to be believed.
With all that said, I can’t help but reward Zardoz with some level of shaggy respect. There isn’t a predictable moment in the whole damn thing. Indeed, I went through entire sequences without blinking. I truly can’t do justice to how awkwardly thought-provoking this movie is. In that way, Zardoz stands apart from every other bad movie I’ve reviewed. Where those other films can be enjoyed for their disposable ineptitude, this one features paradoxical skill and confidence. Boorman, cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, and female lead Charlotte Rampling are Oscar-level talents. Sean Connery is one of cinema’s biggest stars. Despite its complete badness, Zardoz has the look and feel of a much better movie.
All these conflicting emotions make Zardoz a difficult film to score. Somehow, those two stars either feel way too high or way too low. Or maybe both. Whatever the case, watch this movie with multiple people and you’ll likely get multiple opinions. To give you a final sense of how much this movie blew my damn mind, I’ll share the last sentence in my notes: “If God didn’t want movies like Zardoz to exist, He wouldn’t have given us cocaine.”
102 min. R. On Demand.
