Caleb Stokes has written the absolute best defense for a bad movie I have ever read. Enjoy!
Go ahead; I’ll wait….
Yes, that was Sean Connery in a speedo. Yes, he wears it for the entire film. Yes, Zardoz is a giant floating stone head that pukes guns so that other, all-too-hairy men can pillage what appears to be the Scottish Highlands. And yes, if you were to come over and watch a movie with me right now, this would be my choice…or something very similar.
In the past, people have questioned my unflinching dedication to crap movies. Just the other day, my friend D. was flabbergasted by my insistence that The Room is the single best theater experience devised in the last 20 years. It only got worse when he heard my other recommendations (which included El Topo, Deathbed: The Bed That Eats People, The Impossible Kid, The Happening…). We had a passionate debate on the subject, and I reprint my thoughts here in the interest of expanding some horizons.
Let’s pretend you and I are having a science fiction film festival (haha…dweeb); I have to rate the quality of the movies we could watch in order to decide which to screen.
Blade Runner=GREAT
Moon=Really Good
Alien=Good
Logan’s Run=OK
Avatar=Meh
Lost in Space=Sucks
Zardoz=Absolutely Terrible
So here’s the thing: it is not as if I don’t realize that Zardoz is terrible, or think that any of the other drek that might replace it constitutes superior film-making. We can both agree that this movie is total crap. In fact, no matter what order I put those first six movies in, or what movies I even include on the list, 99 times out of 100 any sane person in the world is going to put Zardoz last based on the trailer alone.
And I propose that is why we absolutely MUST watch Zardoz.
We don’t live in a world of singular production anymore; we aren’t viewing a freakin’ Matisse painting. Everything(at least in Western culture) is mass-produced and ubiqutously disseminated. So I guess if you’d never seen any science fiction movie ever before, certainly we’d start off on Blade Runner. If you’d never seen a MOVIE before, I’d put in some Chaplin or Arsenic and Old Lace or Throne of Blood. But the thing is, you probably wouldn’t be coming to science fiction movie night if either of those were the case.
Great art, in the modern world especially, works on man’s capacity for wonder; it rises above the Avatars of the world by sticking in our minds after the entertainment has past. But we, in our mass culture, are surrounded on all sides by entertaining films, and if we try, we could watch nothing but fantastically-crafted cinema for the rest of our lives; there are enough of them out there.
By and large, that’s what we should do. And when the fantastic begins to seem mundane, we make our own films and innovate, and the medium moves forward. However, maybe we aren’t out to change the world that particular night. Maybe we don’t even know each other that well, or our aesthetic organs digest in vastly different ways. Maybe we just want to have fun experiencing that elevator ride away from the mundane.
Zardoz does just that, only this elevator goes down, and we can all agree on how far (i.e. to the very bottom). For anyone who understands good film, or good anything, movies like Zardoz can produce the same sublime wonder as finally crafted work. Only with Zardoz, we aren’t quietly delving into our own psyches to ask these probing questions. No, with Zardoz, we can ask those questions collectively as an audience.
AS A COMMUNITY, we ask why in God’s name the costume department went with red speedos? What poor bastard paid to see this crap? Or worse, make it? Does Sean Connery wake up in cold sweats, haunted by what the floating stone head could have done to his career? Didn’t a single person on the set have any taste?
Zardoz and its ilk bring people together like only terrible art can; it unites us with the only boundless human emotion: scorn. All the ingredients of a great movie will still be there, just negatively defined. Instead of merely recognizing the tenants of good art, we can appreciate and long for them, as it should be.
So if you come over to my house for movie night, bring me some Direct-To-Video crap I’ve never heard of on a bootlegged DVD. We’ll be better friends for it. Popcorn is on me.
THE POPGUN IS GOOD. THE PENIS IS EVIL!!!!!!!!!!!
Much love to the bad movies of the world.
I absolutely love the Super Mario Brothers Movie.
We all know that movie was total crap.
Seriously (okay… seriously… now… for real!) there is one glaring omission from that list and that piece of cinematic crap is Krull.
Krull is so bad that I can’t even watch it. My buddy bought me a copy for my birthday (or was it Christmas) and I’ve never even opened it…
My point is that you can own a free, unopened copy of Krull for the cost of postage…
The Gun is good. The Penis is evil!
I watched this a year or so back and it was terrible. It was so bad a few of the people watching it paused to try and get high to make it more enjoyable, i don’t think it worked for them.
And Cody you seem to have a love for the terrible, some former friends of mine have been running their own podcast for a while now that may have some gems you’ve never heard of, and of course some blatantly obvious ones everyone would like to forget. http://smnpodcast.com/ and even if you don’t get into their show, they’ve got a huge list on their site of the films in their hat that they draw from.
Its shocking to know the director of Zardoz also made Deliverance and Excalibur.
My post got edited? Really? Wow… Okay…
I’ll gladly take Krull off your hands, that movie rocks!
Kull the conqueror on the other hand…..is still fun.
Speaking of bad movies, my wife and I are going to watch Xanadu tonight.
The movie does suck, but man it has a great soundtrack!
There is one movie that was absolutely terrible, that I watched with my cousin one night since it was on the tv. And we have yet to meet anyone who’s even heard of the movie besides us. We both love it regardless of it’s terrible everything. I like to give out the example to people that it has Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger lightning effects in it, all the the while being a movie made in 2004. I don’t think I could ever be better friends with a person than if we sat down and watched Scarecrows Gone Wild together. While watching good movies is a bonding moment within itself, terrible movies are even better ones. I feel like the experience is more unique than watching a movie that everyone loves. I totally recommend finding a copy of it to watch. If you have Netflix I know you can get it from there, just not on instant view or what ever it’s called.
I’ll top you that with Winterbeast. It’s like Evil Dead Meets Northern Exposure! or so the case claims.
Zardoz is on Fox Movie channel tonight.
and it was terribly awesome. Ive stomached a lot of crap in my time but good god Zardoz is now the shining gem of my list. like a virus, I intend to spread this movie to anyone who isn’t smart enough to run from my next movie night. Thank you Caleb for turning me onto this masterwork. They proved that you can polish a turd.
Zardoz is a great movie; I don’t care what anyone says. You just need to let it be what it is. It’s a surreal, dream-like story that has actual things to say about class, religion, and humanity’s relationship with (and contempt for) the natural world. The people who hate on this movie as the sort that read Kafka and complain about his novels being “unrealistic.” Is it utterly twisted and weird? Yes. Is it campy as all hell? Yes. So what… Let Zardoz be Zardoz; put aside your preconceptions how a story “should” be told and you might find an experience very much worth having.
I think that’s exactly what Caleb was saying.