But Monster-a-Go-Go came out in 1965. The Creeping Terror (featuring killer carpet samples from outer space) came out in 1964. Prince of Space (which possibly shouldn’t count, since it was cobbled together from Japanese kiddie serials) came out in 1959. Laserblast (which sort of counts as an alien invasion movie) came out in 1978. All of those are, I assure you, much much worse than Skyline. Granted, most of those are available in a form in which Crow and Tom Servo are there to help ease the pain, but still.
The Brothers Strauss are perhaps the single most inept filmmaking duo working in the studio system today. There isn’t a moment here they get right, not a single decision they make that doesn’t end ridiculously. In fact, there are three chief moments in the film where they seem to be making bold, inspired choices, only to completely fuck it up each time. The film opens with light descending from the skies – the alien invasion beginning right there in frame one. Wow, you think. They sure are dispensing with the bullshit. There’s no foreplay, no dicking around; just aliens showing up to kick some ass. And then, a moment later, just as things are getting really interesting, the movie jumps back 15 hours to give us 20 minutes of needless exposition (that never amounts to anything) about wafer thin characters we never are allowed to really give a shit about anyway.
Honestly, who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to make an alien invasion movie that, rather than following around scientists or soldiers or reporters or anyone interesting, follows around a group of AFFLICTION wearing, narcissistic, LA douchebags “living the life” off of new money they have no qualms about throwing around? These aren’t the types of people we want to connect with – these are the first ones to die in every other film EVER MADE. They are every bit as hollow, vapid and unlikable as they are when they are *supposed to be* hollow, vapid and unlikable; only here they get to be the protagonists. And the Brothers Strauss have no idea how to make them in any way endearing. They are thoroughly unlikable and just plain annoying from beginning to end. So when they start dropping off like flies, you not only aren’t invested in them, you kind of wish they would die off faster.
But don’t let that excerpt fool you. He also has some negative things to say about it.
Zardoz
Directed by: John Boorman
Written by: John Boorman
Starring: Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, John Alderton, Sally Anne Newton, Niall Buggy, and a whole bunch of people who would really prefer you not bring it up.
Sometimes, through no fault of their own, certain science fiction films garner undeserved reputations as horrible failures, despite many sterling qualities.
Zardoz is not one of those films.
Given that John Boorman wrote, produced and directed this fiasco, you have to wonder what the pitch session was like:
Boorman: It has a giant floating stone head!
Studio head: (dead silence)
Boorman: It has an immortal society where everyone bakes bread and no one has sex!
Studio head: (dead silence)
Boorman: There’s a group of Apathetics who just stand around, and another group called the Renegades who are old people who wear formal clothing and have dance parties!
Studio head: (dead silence)
Boorman: Uh, there are also a lot of half-naked hippie chicks standing around.
Studio head: OK, here’s some money.
Today, Zardoz is most remembered (if it’s remembered at all) for Sean Connery running around in a loincloth, as well as the immortal line “The gun is good, the penis is evil.” But in truth that only scratches the surface of a film that’s by turns portentous, bizarre, badly dated and incoherent.
Perhaps the most risible of all the film’s elements are the overall production design, and especially the costumes. The hippie dippy utopia Connery’s character visits looks like it was outfitted in costumes left over after a community college production of Hair or Godspell, complete with billowy peasant halters (the film’s high naked breast count is one of its few non-camp virtues).
Believe it or not, this is one of the most coherent scenes in the movie.
Outside the Utopian bubble, the “outlanders” all wear tattered wool suits that make them look like extras from Oliver!, despite it being some 200 years since the (ill-defined) collapse of civilization. The furnishings inside the bubble are heavy on reflecting mirrors and bead curtains. English manor houses are rendered “futuristic” by attaching plastic bags to them.
The scene where Connery is “sucked” into the vortex is almost as bad as people pulling the ravenous carpet samples up over them in The Creeping Terror.
Every now and then an interesting idea floats to the surface (immortals can’t be killed, but they can be aged as punishment, bringing up shades of the struldbrugs from Gulliver’s Travels), only to sink again beneath another wave of improbable schlock.
There’s plenty of low humor to be had, such as the scene where the women quiz Connery to find out what this thing called “an erection” is, since they’ve done away with sex entirely. (Evidently this Utopia was founded by Andrea Dworkin.) And the film is so bad it’s the perfect target for a viewing party to make fun of. And it’s so oddly wrong-headed that it’s seldom boring.
Indeed, Zardoz is so bad, and so emblematic of a particular type of cinematic excess and incoherence that was only on display in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that it actually gives you a new appreciation for other early 1970s science fiction films. Silent Running and Logan’s Run had their problems but, lord, at least their directors had some idea of how to tell a story.
Boorman’s film is so oblique, so deeply personal and relentlessly anti-commercial, with such a thoroughly unpleasant protagonist (it’s hard to get an exact count on just how many women Connery’s character rapes in the film, since there are some flashbacks repeated, sometimes he starts to rape someone, only to have her resistance turn to sudden ardor, and sometimes he only gets started raping before changing his mind…), that you wonder how it got made in the first place.
We watched this at A.T. Campbell’s video party, and it was so bad we had to follow it up with The Incredibles, which is looking more and more like not just one of the greatest films of the last ten years, but one of the greatest films ever, period. You’ll enjoy watching it for the ninth time much better than you’ll enjoy watching Zardoz once.
Perhaps you’ve heard or read me mention how Exterminator City is the worst film ever made. (The preceding sentence has an Amazon link to the DVD, but you should not buy or watch Exterminator City. Trust me.)
But now that I’ve been hearing about it, could After Last Season actually be worse? Well, let’s take a look at the official trailer, shall we?
Wow. 93 minutes of footage to chose from, and that’s what they thought would entice people into theaters? “C’mon, honey, we have to see this! It has people talking about directions, a fake MRI scanner covered in paper, and bad CGI circa 1985! What are we waiting for?’
OK, maybe they just didn’t know how to make a trailer. Maybe some movie reviewers have found it an undiscovered gem.
Maybe not.
“This isn’t just the worst film of the year, this is the worst theatrically released film of the decade” raves Ain’t It Cool News’ movie critic Massawyrm. “I will even go so far as to say that it is the worst theatrically distributed film of the modern era. Terrible lighting and sound is just the beginning of this fetid, painful, epic wonderland of suck. A truly unbelievable experience. It’s almost adorable how hard they try to convince you that an unfinished basement, sheets, cardboard and printer paper is a medical facility of any value. It’s kind of like a kid wearing a towel and a bucket trying to convince you he’s a knight. If you watch this, and I know some of you will, do not, I repeat, do not watch it alone. Get friends. You’ll need them when the movie slips into screensaver mode. And beer. Lots of beer. Trust me. Sober is no way to experience After Last Season.”
“After Last Season is as bad as it looks,” opines Hammer To Nails’ David Lowry, “but its badness is of such a quizzical sort that it transcends mere incompetence. It is formally engaging, because it is so formally incorrect. It is not at all unlike its trailer, in that it primarily consists of a series of choices that seem to have been made entirely arbitrarily, in service of a plot that is buried in non sequitur. To watch the film is to take in the vision of someone with a severe case of disconnection: what is most consistently striking about the film is that the gap between conception and realization is irreparably wide. The most direct example (even moreso than the cardboard MRI scanner) occurs when a character reads a story in the newspaper – and that newspaper is represented by a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper, fresh from the inkjet printer, upon which has been printed the words ‘Morning News.’”
“From a technical standpoint, After Last Season is an abysmal entry,” says Picture Show Pundits’ Nate Zoebl. “It fails not just because of its lack of funds but it fails because [Director Mark] Region lacks any filmmaking ability whatsoever. Sure, apparently the man was able to pose actors, have them recite lines, and keep the cameras running, but I expect more from my movies than the same criteria I have for family vacation videos. Region’s directorial style is, ostensibly, to have no discernible visual sensibility at all. Actors will routinely be cut out from the camera frame or the spatial relations will be completely out of whack, allowing for tremendous space above heads or showing the actor’s complete body except the upper half of the face. Characters will be bunched in one tiny section of the screen, or Region will suddenly cut back and forth between two different shots that conflict from a geographic standpoint; they don’t visually match up. There isn’t a single shot anywhere in After Last Season that couldn’t have been credited to a tripod for complete creative inspiration….the movie is technically inept on every level of filmmaking with a bad script, bad actors, bad pacing, bad direction, bad sets, bad sound coverage, bad ‘special effects,’ and really bad editing. If Region was dreaming of creating a midnight-movie sensation like The Room then he missed the mark. This movie isn’t any fun whatsoever to watch because there’s not enough going on to laugh at. With The Room, every scene had like eight things wrong with it; that film was a 1000 brushstrokes of bad. With After Last Season, it’s the same forehead-smacking flaws repeated ad nausium. There’s no derisive joy to be had here, folks.”
And my favorite theory about the movie, from Nick Nobel at Your Stupid Minds: “My theory is that Mark Region was in group therapy for a mild social or psychological disorder. As part of his treatment, one assignment involved a creative writing project dealing with his disorder in some way. Region wrote a short screenplay and, compared to the others, it wasn’t too shabby. Ego boosted, he expanded it into a feature and spent the next 10 years hounding friends and family for money to produce it….The way the lines are written, again, feels like someone with a social disorder imitating how normal people interact. I’m sure that was part of the assignment as well.”
Need one final bit of evidence? On the film’s official site, the first favorable quote is from a random Amazon customer review, while second is from a random IMDB user review. (Danger, Will Robinson!)
For the record, for those of you I regularly view movies with (you know who you are), do not obtain this movie and inflict it on me. After Exterminator City, I’ve come to realize there are limits to how bad a film I’m willing to sit through. After Last Season sounds like it could very well exceed those limits.
On the other hand, reading about it did accomplish one thing: I think I may now be ready to see The Room…
And just for the sake of reference, here’s the robot swordfight scene from Exterminator City. Remember: This is the best scene in the entire movie.
