86.5% is still human

1993 was a good year for Olivier Gruner and director Albert Pyun. Basically because it would never get this good for them ever again. They made a little B-movie sci-fi film that successfully synthesized every Cyberpunk story ever written far better than 'real' movies like the cinematization of Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic in 1995 with 'real' actors like Keanu Reeves, Dina Meyer (the female lead starship trooper who dies in Starship Troopers) Dolph Lundgren and Takeshi Kitano. Nemesis, for all its many, many faults, seemed to be the only movie in 1993 paying attention to science fiction written after 1965. It went on to enough success it bankrolled a pair of sequals: the laughable bad Nemesis 2 notable for its bizarrely mesomorphic casting choice of Sue Price as a gynoid freedom fighter. And the agaonizingly unwatchable Nemesis 3. Thankfully by the time I'd finished watching Nemesis 3 I had micro-lesions on my frontal lobe that rendered me physically incapable of even aknowledging he made Nemesis 4.

Pictured above: bodybuilder Sue Price carries the entire movie in Nemesis 2: electric boogaloo

Nemesis 2: Nebula (actual irrelevance of title to movie 86.5%) essentially had nothing whatsoever to do with the first movie and was in no way connected to cyberpunk, instead it was a kindof deathmatch between a heroine pumped to ridiculous proportions with roids and breast augmentation vs some guy in a rubber suit recycled from The Guyver.

Nemesis 3: massive cerebral hemorrhage waiting to happen was an exciting look at what would happen if the main character spent an entire movie slowly dying while crawling around naked in the same ruined square block of some bombed out east-bloc city and fucked gross strangers in cars. Sortof like a load tolerance stress test for the audience to see how long it took them to figure out it was Albert Pyun, some guy with a camera and about 400$ US getting passersby in Bratislava to adlib lines. I'm pretty sure the guns weren't props, just the personal firearms of local citizens conned into posing in front of the camera. News flash for Pyun, you are not Goddard. Also, nobody actually likes Goddard, they just pretend to in front of other film buffs like guys suck in their guts around women.

All this to say, you're looking at the pinnacle of the art form when you watch the original Nemesis. Sure the crew couldn't record sound for shit and all the lines had to be dubbed later on, but Gruner, in his prime, was as close to a meat-machine as you could hope for, displaying an athleticism that convinces you he's mostly cyborg; and Pyun, when he was trying (or before he got coked out and lost his mind) put more effort into conveying menace and tension with a single shot of bad guys hurrying down a hallway then he did during the entirety of the next sequel. Watch this clip of the first ten minutes.


You know this movie is about to rack up a serious body count when the good guy savagely decapitates a blonde hottie instead of sleeping with her. Not content with shooting her in the face all mafia stylz so her mama can't have an open-casket funeral her shoots her in that spot that makes her whole head erupt so all that's left is her lower jaw and a spanking animatronic tongue. And this happens before the title credits have finished. Pyun films the opening chase and fight scene with a tactile caress that is almost pornographic (and we're talking about how you rewatched at 7:05 to get the full effect of the upskirt on the babe in the minidress emptying an H&K MP5 bullethose).

He shoots the entire choreography from 2 or sometimes 3 angles, just to give him room to edit back and forth as they unleash a thousand rounds of ammo in just over five minutes. In five minutes and five seconds there are 161 edits with a minimum of 10 cuts for each exchange of gunfire. I particularly like the cuts at 6:35 to 6:41 where he cuts to an extreme long shot of all sorts of hell being unleashed so he can get the rapid-fire exchange of bullets and the reports of the bullets hitting in frame together then cuts again to the leader of the bad guys unshipping the folding stock of her monster gun while the same gun battle echoes in the distance.

Now for the bad news. I hoped you liked those ten minutes because most of the rest of the film is, hmmm, shall we say a letdown. We're talking last episode of Seinfeld letdown. No, scratch that, we're talking TV writer strike letdown.

So, here, in no particular order, are the top 6 sucktastic moments of Nemesis:

1. Bryon James trying to do a german accent. After a career-making role as Leon, the homicidal android forklift driver in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Bryon James went on to portray other villains, and bounced around in a lot of B-grade sci-fi (see both him and fellow b-grade staple Tim Thomerson in Cherry 2000). As a viewer of this movie, I was desperate to draw similarities between Nemesis and the cult hit Blade Runner (the movie that mostly inspired the cyberpunk movement) just so the whole thing make a kindof perfect circle of postmodern self-reference. I was overjoyed to see James as one of the heavies in this flick. Until, that is, he opened his mouth. He has what linguists refer to as perhaps the worst german accent to ever be uttered by a human being. It's like he'd never even heard a german speak before. It's like he'd never even heard of Germany before. Seriously, how fucking hard would it have been for him to flip channels to an old Hogan's Heroes rerun before showing up to the film set. The legend of how astoundingly bad his german accent is in this movie has given rise to the myth that James' character wasn't supposed to be german at all and he was simply unable to resist making fun of Gruner's acting.

2. The climactic fight scene pits Gruner against one of the animated skeletons from Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. In a film shot without much to speak of for a budget and with most of that money already spent on ammunition, blood squibs and that awesome headless corpse in the opening credits, a big climax fight scene was bound to be a crapshoot. And by that I mean about as good as monkeys flinging shit at you. This scene called for the bad guy's entire flesh exterior is blown off and a savage beat-down as he starts opening whoop-ass like the terminator at the end of The Terminator, and actually rips the top of Gruner's head off. About now a normal director (read: only mildly coked-out instead of coked out like Charlie Sheen) would maybe unlock the writer from his bamboo cage and get him to change the ending. But not Pyun. Rewrite? Never! Instead they dusted off some of Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation that was cutting edge in say, 1933, when he dazzled audiences with an aerial dogfight between biplanes and King Kong on top of the Empire State building. It's so jarring the entire film derails and any shred of suspension of disbelief remaining gets flung at the screen along with whatever heavy object you can reach.

3. Gruner's mullet wig. In an effort to show how Gruner's character keeps getting blown up and rebuilt over and over again the special makeup effects people pull out all the stops with a series of descendingly atrocious wigs. Bad wig days seemed to be the general rule for this shoot, including the super-back-combed mass on the love interest in the second act - what was considered totally Hawt at the time - and today just seems like her hair product didn't agree with the Javanese humidity.
I'm the real Olivier Gruner! Look at my chiseled jaw and boss haircut.NO, I am the real Olivier Gruner! Bet you couldn't tell while my entire image is redone with the simple addition of a 1.99$ joke shop wig.

NO, I alone am Olivier Gru-- oh screw this. I'm sitting here wondering if my pay cheque is going to clear while they put this Guns'n'Roses Slash wig on me and Bryon James makes fun of my accent. Where the fuck did I go wrong?

4. The big finish is shot in exciting, tropical - where the fuck? No one knows where the hell Java actually is or knows who lives there except java is also a word for coffee so I assume it has something to do with growing coffee beans. I think the script originally called for a shoot in a 'Japanese hotel' and when the budget turned out to be essentially pizza money and pocket lint they did a quick correction to 'Javanese hotel' with some whiteout and ball-point pen. So instead of a bunch of yakuza heavies that show up in the third act to keep the brain-damaged, wandering plot on track we get polynesian surfer yakuza dudes in Hawaiian shirts, with such spot-on gangster dialogue such as 'chill out, brah, you live longer'.
In the grand film noir tradition of Johnny LaRue's gritty detective movie, Polynesiatown, Pyun sicks the Javanese surfer yakuza dudes on the bad guys. At least LaRue's movie had that crane shot.

6. Little old ladies packing heat. For some unknown reason eurotrash cyborgs start harassing local citizens on the street looking for the good guy. After one asshole starts hassling a little old lady for kicks she then produces a .45 auto and wastes the fucker, palsied hand or no. The premise of this scene, as dumb as it is, isn't the terrible part. To the contrary it's fucking awesome. What's terrible is the logic behind how easily cyborgs die. Two scenes earlier it takes a pair of 50 cal machineguns continually firing for at least 30 seconds just to knock a cyborg down. Then another guy has to empty a clip into her spine just to cut her legs off. And she still isn't dead. Nor does she die after Tim Thomerson gouges out her eyes and skullfucks her memory interface. He has to empty another clip into her forehead at point blank range to do the job. And yet here's granny smith who gets off a couple 45 slugs into a cyborg's kidneys and he goes down like a prom date, begging for his mechanical life like a pussy while she plugs him five or six times. WTF?

Where Pyun got it right.
Despite it all there's a certain operatic quality to Nemesis. Like his hero, Sergio Leone, Pyun sets up his scenes with a kindof lazy machismo, allowing characters to stand around looking menacing and vulnerable in perfectly framed establishing shots. Moving between extreme long shots and closups that wring all the emotion possible from the slab of frozen beef, Gruner. Nemesis tends to slide into staging shots that look like a western, in ghost towns and jails from a century ago, with dust blowing in the background. There's a keen eye for light and colour that is easy to miss while you're laughing at the terrible acting or raging against the cheap special effects. Los angeles is a sepiatone reminiscent of Chinatown. The main character's descent into despair and drug addiction is marked with deep blue filters.

Where Pyun excels is a flair for staging the kinetic ballet of violence choreography. The worst thing you can say about the action as that he blew his wad too soon, packing so much in the opening ten minutes there wasn't much room left to go except downhill. despite that he never stoops to using the same shot twice, and each fight is a treat of inventive genius. Sometimes these perfectly staged shots are borrowed from other (better) pictures like a slow-motion gunfight that erupts through a triptych of floor-to-ceiling glass windows taken straight from the iconic Jesse James escape through the plate-glass storefront in the Long Riders. Other times Pyun invents something so utterly kick-ass it gets pirated years later like his escape from a java hotel by shooting a hole in the floor around his feet that was redone almost shot for shot in Underworld.

Check out this clip at 7:05 to see where Underworld got the idea.

Pyun's greatest strength is his ability to go balls-out, ape-shit over the top whenever the fuck he feels like it. Where other directors swim back to shore at the sign that says 'Danger' he swims out into the undertow past the sign that says 'Beware telekinetic shark-pirhana men with laser-guided anal-probe harpoons'. Maybe it's Pyun's training on the set with Kurosawa (I shit you not) that cemented his unflinching ability to say 'in this scene he fucks her through an artificial vagina implanted in her belly button with his mechanical eye-ball cock'; certainly there's a hint of later japanese shock-cinema in his work.

Check out this cyborg nutshot that caps all the action in the movie. After jumping out of no less than five buildings, killing untold men, women and cyborgs, having his arms legs and scalp blown off and put back on twice, doing a quadruple backflip high dive off a frickin cliff while shooting a rocket propelled grenade and finally dropping the evil mastermind out the bottom of a harrier jump-jet and into an active volcano with a time bomb fuck-you bon voyage present by severing his own left arm, director Pyun somehow decided not enough cyborgs had their balls blown off. Watch at 1:35 to see a 9mm cyber-gonad castration.

Connery's kickass mustache owns the future.

I have vivid, memories of the 1970’s. And by vivid I mean nightmare fuel. Being neurologically atypical I’ve always been unable to stop myself from witnessing the true horror of the world while others blithely run through the flowery meadows in search of Julie Andrews to tell them just how alive the hills are. But this was bad. My own private ‘Nam flashback kinda bad. I must’ve been around 8 years old the first time I saw Zardoz on late-night television, which alone could account for only a small percentage of the dope-fueled trippiness the 70s was intent on force-feeding all children as the straights and squares started discovering just how fun and easily 60s counter-culture could be assimilated into mainstream culture and more importantly, commercialized. Zardoz was the least of my worries.

At that age my older brother, through a combination of good looks and charm (read ‘fucking asshole’) was sixteen and fast becoming the most popular kid in highschool, swaggering through life like he owned the place. He was already dating an eighteen year old blonde senior and she drove a candy-apple blue corvette convertible. He and his friends pretty much were this bunch of pricks.

Above, nomatter how bad you imagine the 70's, even Dazed and Confused awful, it sucked way worse.

In a moment of bitter irony my brother would grow up to be an even more bitter malcontent who made a lot of money crewing Hollywood movies and moved to Austin, Texas, where he crewed for the shoot of Dazed and Confused. During this he bitched endlessly how Linklater just wasn’t capturing the 70s because the actors weren’t bringing the level of tawdry small-mindedness of the real era. That's right, you heard me. A real-life insufferable asshole from highschool circa 1978 didn't feel that Dazed and Confused made the 70's look shiteous enough.

My sister, like all teenage girls in the 70s spent at least 16 hours a day on the telephone with her friends. And by telephone we’re referring to those black, rotary-dial monsters that weighed as much as a car engine and gave you a workout simply challenging the big mechanical gear on the lid. These sort of phones don’t even exist outside of museums anymore unless you shop at Toys r Us where the good people at Fisher Price are still making pulltoy models that no toddler even remotely considers related to telecommunications, but rather a crappily made car that’s so precariously fragile they tie parts that tend to break together with a rope.

Ring Ding! Hello mom and dad? Buy me a toy that looks like an actual fucking phone!

She was busy masterminding the eventual bloodless coup that would leave her in command of the cheerleading squad which, under her iron rule, would go on to narrowly lose first place at the provincial championship. I hardly blame my sister for this since by the time I write this pretty much every single teenager on the planet spends more time wired than a girl in the 70’s could ever dream of, especially with all that time taken up by dreaming of Shaun Cassidy.

Hawt in the 70s

Stalinesque jockeying for power and compulsion to dominate at cheerleading were also all too real in the 70's.

All this to say that by 1978 neither my brother nor my sister did anything so lame as hang out at home so my parents could duck out of two-thirds of their child-rearing responsibility every Friday and Saturday night, leaving only their tail-end spawn at home. They used the extra leisure time to grow a series of hairier and hairier handlebar mustaches or bleach their hair blonde, invite all their close personal friends over for loud parties and crank up the Deep Purple.

All this to say I was essentially unsupervised every weekend night except for the fourth sibling in my little family, the glass and fake-wood-paneling bulk of the television in the basement rec room. This television was a stone-age monster by today’s standards sortof one step up from a box with a bird inside who chisels pictures on slabs of stone with his beak and shrugs, saying ‘It’s a living’. And like our telephone it required getting out of your chair and turning big clunky dials on the face of the machine. But if you didn’t count the agonizing two minutes it took for the screen to warm up it lasted my entire childhood without breaking, something even the top of the line models of today can’t do because they are designed to be POS fail-bombs about five minutes after the warranty expires. Welcome to the high-tech future where we are forced to re-buy every household chunk of electronics every 25 months because it’s cheaper than fixing the busted one. It was around this time my parents leapt into the future with the twin strides of a cable box offering (gasp) something like 30 channels and a VCR. I’m surprised we didn’t end up with a dead-end technology betamax machine given my father’s still obvious tech-savviness that means a little square of tape is pasted over the clock face of the VCR that has been steadily blinking since around 1989 when I moved away from home. With that first VCR you had to fine tune each individual TV channel on the machine with a series of minute switches and Lilliputian dials before you could use it. If it hadn’t been for my unhealthy obsession with the all-new technology the VCR it would’ve remained a big paperweight on the TV until my parents tried to rent out Coma or Every Which Way But Loose or some movie where Dolly Parton almost falls out of her shirt.

Hawt in the 70s

It was during this period, while my parents and their guests partied steadily and noisily from above me, I got to watch a lot of movies my parent’s should’ve had the better sense to turn off. Including Zardoz, starring a certain Sean Connery. Zardoz is a 1974 science fiction film. Although more accurately it is a crazy-ass drug-trip softcore porn hallucination vomited out by director John Boorman much in the same way the godlike floating head of Zardoz showers his cult of homicidal maniacs with guns n ammo. You know these guys are bad mofos when Connery turns to the camera and shoots the cameraman in the face during the opening scene (using a Webley .455, the only fully automatic revolver ever mass produced). He was probably aiming for Boorman.

Zardoz worshippers run around wearing what is essentially a mask of the god Janus, ancient Roman god of fucking shit up (also the main bad guy in one of my favourite episodes of Buffy) and a red loincloth. Many critics of this movie can’t get over the Connery is in a diaper factor but fail to recognize the pure awesomeness of his vast amounts of exposed body hair, in particular the instant win of his handlebar moustache. Connery’s revealing outfit assures us he has more hair on his nutsack than Gerard Butler has on his entire body. It only makes Connery even more badass. Let’s face it, you’re apparently a gun-crazed murderer who has survived the apocalypse and lives only to massacre every living being on the orders of a giant floating head that showers your with large-calibre firearms. People live in fear that you and your marauding band of screaming lunatics will sweep down from the hills and blast everyone they’ve ever known into oblivion. I’d have a hard time not wearing whatever the fuck I wanted. Who’s going to laugh? You? Nope, cause me and my man-pelt just annihilated your entire family.

Above: not your typical exchange between god and his subjects . Imagine Moses coming down from the mountain and saying “Thou shalt lemme show you what my AK can do, bitches.”

In 1978 TSR paid James L Ward to adapt his kinda cool but mostly unplayable RPG Metamorphosis Alpha into the vastly superior and fuck-yeah inspiring Gamma World RPG. Gamma World was a post-apocalyptic role-playing game that borrowed most of the rules from TSR’s Dungeons and Dragons to save time and spent the rest of the budget packing the rulebook with randomly generated mutant superpowers for your character and a list of mutants, robots and high-tech gadgets for you to pick up as ‘treasure’. 1^st Ed Gamma World had none of the constraints of Dungeons and Dragons where you were basically channeled into some sort of high fantasy Tolkienesque storyline involving elves and evil wizards. Gamma World was about nothing but causing havoc with your mutations that ranged from the massively overpowered (shooting radiation death-beams from your eyes) to the cripplingly useless (you suffer from seizures that make you fall down and foam at the mouth whenever you are attacked) You struggled to stay alive past the radiation, deathbots and freaky mutant xenophobe bunnymen long enough to plunder ancient ruins until you were able to get into your flying car armed to the teeth with laser cannons, powered combat armor and shoulder-fired neutron missiles and vaporize everything you laid eyes on.

You thought I made that part up, didn't you? Nobody say "Fudd".

The game was so short of actual goals that to provide some semblance of playability the designers added a section called Cryptic Alliances – secret societies with weird competing goals – for players to adopt. You could be a benign technophobe (the Seekers), a primitive screwhead blindly following the insane screeds of a five-hundred year old traffic monitoring computer (Followers of the Voice) or a kind of post-apocalyptic White Aryan Brotherhood devoted to wiping out all the mutants so non-mutated humans could return to their rightful place as rulers of the world (the Knights of Genetic Purity). It was a LOT like playing Paranoia without any of the irony. It’s safe to say Paranoia cribbed a goodly amount of the game from somebody’s dog-eared Gamma World rulebook. How Paranoia creators West End Games avoided a court case with the at-the-time notoriously litigious TSR remains a mystery.

Among the Cryptic Alliances was the Red Death: a bunch of murdering lunatics that only existed to kill every living thing on the planet, cut them into cubes and stomp the stewing chunks into paste before consuming themselves in mass suicide, hopefully using some sort of atomic doomsday device. Sound familiar? TSR openly admitted Gamma World was directly inspired by a number of drug-fuelled 70s sci-fi such as Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards. The implication is clear that the red-diaper clad genociders of Zardoz were the inspiration for the Red Death.

Connery and his Red Death cultists hate every living thing so much they firmly believe the ‘penis is bad’ since orgasms just make more babies you’ll have to kill anyway. Mick Farren said it best describing post-apocalypse movies as asexual: “There is no sex in the aftermath, only varying levels of crazy, self-destructive rage. You worked yourself up into a frenzy and then threw yourself in front of a Mack truck.” For a bunch of crazies with serious penis-substitution issues there is an awful lot of fucking that goes on in the rest of Zardoz and remarkably little gore. Probably because it is a British film. In the UK they have a pretty-heavy-handed film censor board that banned movies like Natural Born Killers but seems pretty OK with lots of nudity and screwing, including showing Connery’s enormously potent Scottish wang onscreen. Seems they have this crazy notion that sex is kinda cool and fetishizing murder for society as a whole is batshit retardedness. To get the plot rolling Connery sneaks aboard the giant head inside an offering of baskets of grain the Red Death cultivates using slave labor. Yeah, they started taking captives instead of killing the shit out of everybody on Zardoz’s orders so they could use the slave-labor to play Old MacDonald. This, it turns out, was a bad idea because it made them pretty pissed and they sent Connery on a secret mission to take out their revenge on Zardoz like a kindof Road Warrior James Bond. Ironically Connery apparently took this role to try and break out of the Bond typecasting; and in that sense this movie is a complete success. Bond relies on charm, that Aston Martin with the ejector seat, laser wristwatches, a Venetian gondola that turns into a hovercraft and the occasional army of ninjas. In Zardoz Connery’s only gadgets are his revolver and body hair.

Zardoz the flying head turns out to be a kindof ship that takes him over this massive invisible force field into a kindof Forbidden Zone (Stay tuned for a review of Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone and why Molly Ringwold made me fall in love with redheads). Did I mention the Red Death are trying to get past this big invisible wall so they can find more stuff to kill on the far side? Fuck it, it barely matters in the acid-trip mess that follows.

Connery is so hardcore he attempts to chew his way through the force field.

Apparently beyond the big plate-glass wall is a perfect utopia where a small elite society has perfected technology and never age or die. Also they created the whole Zardoz religion to control the masses outside the wall. Surprise! Zardoz is a big hoax, and in fact is loosely based on the whole ‘pay no attention to that man behind the curtain’ scene from the Wizard of Oz. Get it? wiZARD of OZ? At age 8 I didn’t. Doesn’t matter. Connery is held captive by the deathless ladies of the utopia where he, and the audience, are subjected to a succession of barely coherent scenes that were meant to be ‘mind-blowing’ and ‘far-out’ and achieved at best a kindof cinematic petit-mal seizure. The studio of the day tried to bill Zardoz as Boorman’s answer to fellow Brit filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Basically there wasn’t a director in the UK during the 70’s who wasn’t tripping balls over Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

No caption required.

A bunch of weird shit happens. The utopia ladies read Connery’s mind and find out he’s thinking about sex. Also there’s a weird computer that may be from outer space. Waitasecond, what was that? Did this movie even need a computer from outer space? I’m guessing it was part of the story pitch Boorman sold to the studio to get the green light for this monster. “What do you mean it doesn’t sound like a science fiction movie? It’s, uh, it’s got a COMPUTER. And it’s from OUTER SPACE. You know, like HAL 9000.” But once he started filming it was all “Fuck the studio, drop another lid of acid.” Eventually Connery gets loose and runs around getting up to shit trying to figure out a way to let his buddies past the invisible wall. This doesn’t turn out to be as hard as it should be because, twist ending, the utopians are bored as shit with living forever and just want to die.

Mostly.

There is also a second faction who want to get laid and have babies and start over again. These are the ladies who caught a glimpse of how fucking potent Connery and his moustache are and beg him to impregnate them all. In pure Connery style he bangs every one of them, singlehandedly begetting an entire new generation of hybrids who we’re sure will not only be immortal but murder-machines with enormous balls and moustaches. As these knocked up ladies ride away Connery manages to knock out the force field like a muy macho Ben Kenobi turning off the Death Star tractor beam and hordes of the Red Death deal out the wanton slaughter the bored immortals so desperately wanted. And not a moment too soon; I never would have made it to the orgy of violence in the closing scenes if I had to endure another of Boorman’s acid-trip mind-vs-computer imagery bombardments.

For a child watching this movie one would expect permanent psychic damage, or at the very least micro-lesions on the frontal lobe. But surprisingly this movie didn’t seem that strange. At age 8 I’d already been subject to Jewison’s Rollerball, Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run and Rene Laloux’s animated Fantastic Planet, not to mention the irreparable influence of the world-changing Star Wars in 1977.

My parents let me watch this movie before I was old enough to reach the sink to wash my hands.

You knew that the trippy drug imagery meme had been tapped out when an entire generation of children started getting hysterical about ‘Jawas’, ‘Wookies’, a lovable whistling garbage can robot, and a laser-sword wielding geriatric spouting some semi-mystical bullshit about invisible magic and the adults didn’t bat an eyelash. In other words real life in the 70s didn’t seem that different from what they tried to sell us as science fiction. The 60s radical counter-culture had dissolved like acid in kool-aid until the late 70s when nobody cared anymore because they were bored-to-shit with the drug and alcohol fueled decade’s long hangover. Anybody too busy worrying about enlightenment and good times was due to be steamrollered by Gordon Gecko, and end up serving coffee to yuppies who got onboard the money train then detonated the train station behind them. The 80s was almost upon us and in those terrible times the only purpose your ideals served was to be murdered so you could sell the body parts for profit.

Boorman went on from Zardoz to helm the vastly superior Excalibur, a sweeping epic of sex, violence, betrayal and occasional overacting, following the entire rise and fall of the Arthurian saga with just enough of Zardoz’s weirdness to loan it a sense of magic. Excalibur is still my all-time favourite version of this story, putting to shame the Richard Gere-fest First Knight, starring a geriatric Connery with far less cojones as King Arthur than in Zardoz. While Miranda Richardson and Martin Short clearly win against everything, ever, as Queen Mab and Frick from the Sam Neil miniseries, Merlin, I prefer the realistic scenes of knights as walking human tanks hammering each other into pork chops in Boorman’s Excalibur. Also it has Jean-Luc Picard as Guinevere’s dad. Zardoz itself remains famous for the evenly divided reactions it generates from watchers who stumble across it; you either think it’s cinematic genius or an embarrassing double-barrel nutshot to Connery’s uneven career.