Zardoz (1974) - Because You Watched Starcrash

“The monster is a mirror, and when we look at him, we look into our own hidden faces.” Today the Distinguished Professors do that which all lovers of movies of questionable quality must do: we watched Zardoz, the movie that made the world endure Sean Connery’s excessive hairiness spilling out of a red leather diaper. Topics discussed include the toilet-esque nature of our signature “whoosh,” the highmalarky ratio, comparison with 2001, the pointless floating-head narrator, the androgyny of the Eternals, the future is yet again saved by a hypermasculine dude, the goodness of the gun and the badness of the penis, the complexity of the layers of society, comparisons to Gulliver’s Travels and Dune, the prologue that gives away everything, Zed’s boner, the lack of sustainability of a murder-based society, Clink’s theory that the Brutals would be immortal if the Exterminators didn’t kill them off, bad Connery impressions, Michael Moorcock’s Elric, the constant meeting-hell of the Eternals, Consuela was on Dexter much later on, the cheapness of shooting on an Irish estate, speculated connections with Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, the pointlessness of Friend as a stand-in for Arthur Frayn/ Zardoz, the reallyshort list of other movies starting with a Z, the role of fake art, unnecessary deviation into Look Who’s Talking and M*A*S*H, the lack of irony or thought in the selection of background art in this movie, Shirley usurps Vanderpool’s role in asking us what we learned, Zed kills the dumbass within, the misogyny of the ending, the creation of a new age, our attempt to figure out if this is a pre-, during, or post-apocalyptic movie, and the rejection of the unfettered imagination by the ‘70s.