thuvia ptarth

Wednesday geekturnedvamp showed me the worst movie on the face of the earth. It is even worse than that low-budget low-fi sci-fi movie from the 70s where aliens make people literally explode with orgasms and you can see the boom mikes and the wires and that the UFOs are aluminum pie pans that people were throwing across the camera's field of view like frisbees. At least in that other movie women got to have orgasms. Also it taught me the word "tribadage." Really, it was pretty sex-positive, except for the people exploding part.

Zardoz, on the other hand, is one-third H.G. Wells and one-third dumb pulp dystopias where Women Rule and Life Is Sexless and All You Need to Bring Humanity Back To Life Is Good Hard Fucking And/Or a Murder Or Two and three-thirds We So Totally Wrote the Entire Script While High and the Actors Only Wish They Could Have Been High While Filming It, Too. It would have told me more about director John Boorman's rape issues than I needed to know if I hadn't already seen Excalibur. I kind of love Excalibur, guys, Igraine-Salome of the Veils and rapes in full plate armor and Mordred's golden armor with the nipples and all. Honestly, Igraine-Salome and Mordred's armor are some of the best parts. In Club Vivid, watching "Naughty Girl", I was surrounded by people who did not get the cracktastic glory of Excalibur, and it made me sad.

Geekturnedvamp understands my feelings for Excalibur. That is the pleasure of fandom, you know? There will always be someone, and in this case, counting Sweetestdrain, there are at least three of us.

So, anyway, Geekturnedvamp broke up our vid watching with Zardoz. She insisted. "You have to watch it in a special way," she explained. "Like, I've never been able to watch it straight through. You have to fastforward a lot."

It opens with a disembodied head wearing a blue headdress, with a curly moustache drawn on his face and blue circles drawn on his chin. He has a boring pompous speech. Then there is a stone head floating in the air. It has a boring pompous speech, too, then it vomits up guns and ammo. There are horse-riding barbarians who kill people. There is Sean Connery in this bright red loincloth/diaper which ties up in a big flower whose loose ends frame his penis beautifully. (Geekturnedvamp: "'I gave up Bond for this?'" Me: "'My agent is so totally fired.'") There is a peaceful yet sinister vaguely matriarchal utopia. Charlotte Rampling hates Sean Connery, so you know she's hot for him in the end. There is a kind of cool domineering matriarch who deserves a better movie. There is green bread. There is redemption via rape. (Me: "John Boorman, enough already, I got your rape issues three rapes ago." Geekturnedvamp: "He did Deliverance, too." Me: "No, seriously? Issues!") There are lots of bare breasts, because it was the 70s and they were very excited they could get away with it. There are Wizard of Oz references. There is lots of blue and orange. There are lots of very bad special effects. (Me: "I feel a little sorry for Boorman. He so clearly longed for the invention of CGI.") There's the same fast aging as in Excalibur -- I now feel able to identify more John Boorman storytelling kinks than I ever wanted to know. There are drawings of penises, flaccid and erect. There are sex experiments. There are lots of things in gigantic plastic bags, like tomato plants and babies and naked people in strange positions in the wall. They reminded me of the half-full bags of water my mom would carry live fish home in from the pet store.

At first, it was kind of interesting, in a really horrible way. "This movie should be in every multifandom vid ever," I said in the first five minutes. "I am beginning to think this movie deserves a vid of its very own," I said after another ten minutes. "I am not sure I know of a song special enough for this movie," I said after ten minutes more. "No, really, I don't think I do," I said. It is pretty much like talking to someone who is very drunk or very stoned when you yourself are sober, this movie. Fast-forwarding does not quite work as a substitute for inebriation.