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.