What movie would Sean Connery choose to follow up his run as James Bond with? Well, it's The Offence, but this was his second movie after. And it's definitely the first film John Boorman did after Deliverance. What they created was a film that absolutely cannot be easily explained. I've watched it in the double digits and there are whole sequences that I can't unpack.In the year 2293, Earth has lived beyond the end of the world. There are two populations, the immortal Eternals and the mortal Brutals. The Eternals live in the Vortex, a country estate that affords them comfort at the expense of excitement. The Brutals live in a wasteland growing food for the immortals, yet face constant danger.The group that ties them together are the Brutals, exterminators who are ordered by a giant flying stone head named Zardoz to kill other Brutals and exchange food for more weapons.One of the Brutals, Zed (Connery) goes for a ride on Zardoz, even temporarily killing its pilot, Arthur Frayn. Zed goes to the Vortex, where he meets Consuella (Charlotte Rampling, The Damned, Asylum) and May (Sara Kestelman, Liztomania). They defeat him with psychic powers and use him for menial labor. Consuella wants hm destroyed, while May and Friend want to keep him alive.Zed learns that the Eternals are watched over by an artificial intelligence called the Tabernacle. Because they live forever, they have become bored and no longer have sex. Some of them have fallen into comas and are known as Apathetics. And despite their vast resources of knowledge, all they care about is making special bread, meditating and enforcing their social rules by artificial aging anyone who violates their byzantine rules.The Eternals misjudge Zed - he is far more intelligent than he lets on. He learns that he is part of Arthur Frayn's eugenics experiment and that Frayn is also Zardoz. He's also learned to read, and once he discovers that Zardoz isn't a god but a play on the Wizard of Oz, he becomes enraged.Zed lives up to Arthur's goal for him - to deliver death and freedom (one and the same) to the Eternals. He absorbs all of their knowledge as he leads the Brutals on a killing spree against the Eternals.The film ends with still images of Consuella and Zed falling in love to the tune of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony - an ode to soldiers - and giving birth to a son before they age into skeletons. It's complex and simple and moving and silly all at the same time. Kind of like the rest of Zardoz.I didn't even mention the animated scene of how erections work or Connery in a wedding dress or the weird outfit Zed and the Brutals wear - knee-high boots and a giant red thong.The film was inspired by Boorman almost making The Lord of the Rings. Although the project ended, he wanted to see if he could create his own fantasy world. A fantasy world that makes little or no sense, as evidenced by the spoken word intro that 20th Century Fox executives asked Boorman to create. The goal was to help the audience understand the film. But just look at this dialogue:"I am Arthur Frayn, and I am Zardoz. I have lived three hundred years, and I long to die. But death is no longer possible. I am immortal. I present now my story, full of mystery and intrigue - rich in irony, and most satirical. It is set deep in a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred, but they may. Be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale, I am a fake god by occupation - and a magician, by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented, too, for your entertainment - and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business too?"There's no way to really prepare you for this movie. Trust me when I say that there has never been a movie like it before or since.

In the distant future, a savage (Sean Connery) trained only to kill finds a way into the community of bored immortals that alone preserves humanity's achievements.Roger Ebert called it a "genuinely quirky movie, a trip into a future that seems ruled by perpetually stoned set decorators... The movie is an exercise in self-indulgence." Well, that is is a very polite way of putting it.Of course, it was inevitable that this would be a cult film. Sean Connery in a weird outfit somewhere in the future where the 1970s still exist, only in a strange way. How can that not find a home as a midnight movie? Not really a very good one, but with enough strange moments (including the "erection experiment") to amuse some viewers.

Director John Boorman made a trippy, hippy film that is preposterously 1970s. It is some kind of pseudo intellectual futuristic allegory about society and religion.This really is an cultish, obscure film. Everyone knows about the silly costumes in the film but it is so rarely shown, very few people have actually seen it.Zardoz stars Sean Connery wearing some kind of mankini, at least he had the physique for it. He is a pony tailed barbarian who kills and slaughters in order to keep the population under control. They obey a giant stone head who regularly appears to collect the harvest from the slave population and spews out guns so the barbarians can launch a killing spree.Connery gets inside the head and into a vortex where he finds a race of Immortals who cannot die but they can age as punishment into senility unless they are born again. It looks like death would be welcomed by this people. There is a joker in the pack who pushes Connery to read and realises that Zardoz is pointing him to a yellow brick road.The Emerald isle stands for this futuristic Emerald city, having a real man about causes some eroticism amongst the women inside the vortex but the film is so loosely structured with some bizarre 1970s fashion, oh my John Alderton and his golden locks, please sir, just put it away.The film is rather impenetrable, bizarre and yet wondrous. Despite some not very good effects and not being such a good film it is an important part of British/Irish sci fi.

Zardoz (1974)Set in the year 2293 Zardoz sees society split between the hippy-like 'Eternals' and the poverty-stricken Brutals. The Eternals have established a new order, following the breakdown of civilzation, and are separated by the more undesirable elements of society, the Brutals, by a force field called The Vortex. For The Eternals there's is no illness and no death, hence their name. They are immortal - well, pretty much but this comes at a price. The Eternal males can no longer achieve erection and therefore no future offspring and frankly look too effete to be up for the challenge either way.They have established and control The Tabernacle, an artificial intelligence similar to the Internet now although without irritating pop-up advertisements and each Eternal is linked to The Tabernacle via a crystal surgically-implanted in their forehead. This enables them to tap into the vast source of information the artificial intelligence holds whenever they chose. The Eternals also wear a communication ring that permits them to issue orders and transmit holograms.There's another downside to being an Eternal. If the others consider you too independent in actions and thinking then you will be banished and your aging process speeded up. You'd end up banished to an old people's home, labelled a Renegade and become senile very very quickly.The Eternals don't have much time for those that live on the other side of the Vortex turning a blind eye to their poverty and sickness. The Brutals are kept in line by a massive floating head, a false god named Zardoz that barks out little nuggets of information such as 'the penis is evil' and 'the gun is good' thus encouraging them not to breed but to kill instead. This mantra keeps the number of Brutals down and therefore ensures that the Eternals life of luxury will never be threatened.Sean Connery stars as Zed, both a Brutal and an executioner of other Brutals. He sneaks into the floating stone head that is represents Zardoz and is taken back through the Vortex to The Eternals. He is found and captured by the Eternals who are both repelled and fascinated by him in equal measure - hardly surprising some are fascinated by him given what a hunk he is, adorned in just a red loin-cloth.Eternal May (Sara Kestelman) is keen to study Zed. She discovers that he is a genetic mutant with the scope to become even more intelligent that the Eternals are. Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) sees Zed as a threat to the Eternals' way of life shooting Zed continually filthy looks lest we, the viewer, forget how she feels about him. However a male Eternal, named 'Friend' (John Alderton), sees Zed as a servant and effectively employs him as such. As Zed begins to learn more about the Eternals, himself and The Tabernacle the scene is set for a showdown.Boorman was looking for a project following the cancellation of his intended adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Following the terrific critical and financial success that Deliverance (1972) afforded him Boorman could make pretty much anything he wanted. And he did. He wrote Zardoz. Boorman originally had his Deliverance star Burt Reynolds in mind for the lead. Reynolds was unable to commit due to illness so in stepped Sean Connery, three years after his last official outing as James Bond, marking a complete departure careerwise for the legendary Scot. This change of pace for Connery obviously appealed to him as he went on to dabble with the sci-fi and the fantastical again in the likes of Time Bandits (1981) and Outland (1981).John Boorman's Zardoz is a remarkable amalgamation of elements from A Clockwork Orange, 1984 and Planet of the Apes that, despite its influences, still plays as a unique viewing experience. Complemented by wonderful photography (from 2001: A Space Odyssey's Geoffrey Unsworth) and incredible imagery Zardoz exhibits an imagination that lacks now in mainstream sci-fi following the advent of Star Wars A New Hope. From semi-naked people draped over the imagination sets to Sean Connery in a red loin-cloth, and a rather absurd pony-tail, everything looks absurd. It shouldn't work but somehow it does.Zardoz has become a cult movie following a poor box office showing and being panned by critics upon its initial release. Brave, indulgent and full of invention Boorman's film loses its own thread towards the end drowning a little in a kind of hippie philosophy but it's still jaw- dropping stuff. There's some rather surprising moments, such as where Charlotte Rampling's character looks to turn Connery on with some saucy imagery only to find that he is more aroused by her, meaning that the film still feels fresh regardless of the dated hippy imagery. Recommended.Check out more of my reviews at www.mybloodyreviews.com