The Gun is Good, but this Movie is Completely Insane!

[eric_hinkle]

Oh my gosh, I thought I'd hallucinated this as a child!

I give you... Zardoz!

Mosty here because once, when I was young and somewhat feverish, my father watched this on TV. I vaguely recalled something about a giant flying stone head that spit guns at people and told them, "THE GUN IS GOOD! THE PENIS IS EVIL!" Then there was something about some

Comments

[chipuni]

The gun is good!

The penis is evil!

[eric_hinkle]

I think I heard that somewhere.

[jeriendhal]

THE GUN IS GOOD!

THE PENIS IS EVIL!

Sadly, that was the best part of the movie.

[chipuni]

First review of the movie I ever read described the scene as "Boorman's Project Head Start". You've got to admit, a giant flying stone head (based on a blend of John Brown and Karl Marx) descending from the sky to a bunch of postholocaust barbarians and in a thundering voice praising killing and denouncing fertility tells Dorothy, Toto, and the rest of the audience that they're DEFINITELY not in Kansas any more.

[polaris93]

I saw that years ago. It was . . . weird. A lot of people I went to college with, who saw it in the 1970s, just raved about how trippy it was -- they all dropped Acid and smoked lots of dope, and I guess that's what you need to truly appreciate this movie. I didn't get all that much out of it, because I've been reading real science fiction since I was 8 (1953), and this was like something somebody from some other planet who had never read any science fiction but wanted to make a sci-fi movie might have made if he'd been stoned out of his mind all through production, and only equally stoned actors and actresses to work with. But it did kill a couple of hours that might otherwise have been spent more productively, I guess. I don't think Hollywood's going to remake it, but I can just see the anime version now . . .

[eric_hinkle]

I think they mention on Tv Tropes that this film is best viewed after ingesting lots and lots of high-powered hallucinogens.

[polaris93]

That fits. The people who just raved over it back in the 1970s sort of lived off hallucinogens and beer a lot. I remember a doctor saying of one of them, who ended up in the hospital, that he didn't have quite enough blood in his LSD stream.

ZARDOZ!!!!!!!

[anonymous]

Zardoz was written by John Boorman (the same guy who did Excalibur) from a dream he had. (You're not the only one to expand your dreams into writing projects.)

I first saw it as a free Friday Night movie at college in late 1977. Audience reaction was kind of like what you get nowadays from Meet the Feebles; I distinctly remember the comment "That's the WEIRDEST movie I've ever seen." It immediately went on to inspire a lot of local D&D (including a player-character of mine who became a local legend.)

But you first saw it running a fever? That'd be like Meeting the Feebles on acid!

Re: ZARDOZ!!!!!!!

[eric_hinkle]

Okay, I got to know: who was this legendary PC of yours?

BTW, Ken, if this is you, can you imagine doing Zardoz with your characters, including Malki in Sean Connery's role?