Zardoz
The Wizard of Oz. 50 Shades of Matrix. There’s more flesh on display than all the abbatoir scenes in Rocky.
Sean Connery plays a mutant, the pinnacle of human fitness, cross bred through generations to achieve greatness. And yet, he’s illiterate, tasked with hunting and killing degenerates roaming the land, goaded upon by a physical god, in the shape of a large Janus stone head.
The mantra is simple: the gun is good, the penis is evil. Both are phallic objects spilling seed, one bad that gives life to such arid wasteland, one good that gives death.
This physical god inhabits another secluded location, modelled upon Arcadia, where Eternals like him dwell for eternity, without death. It seems like an utopia, filled with bread-making machines, greenhouses, flour cascades, roaming alpacas, all tended to by a large cast of scantily clad hippy Eternals. There are at least two big warts: a bunch of Renegades, older outcasts, condemned to a life of senility; and the Apathetics, soulless ghouls unmoored from worldly consciousness (not even when the protagonist just grabs a boob with his full hand, out of nowhere).
Nobody wants the drudge work of dealing with the outlands, so our “god” Arthur takes charge, using this power to breed the slave that will set them free, in league with Friend and May. Our protagonist is selected for greatness, invades the Arcadian location and brings his friends to trash the place and do his job: exterminate.
But first, there’s a big PowerPoint presentation on the nature of penile erections (complete with striking images of nubile girls bathing and moaning, and female mud wrestling), but our protagonist only gets hard for Consuella, the one that hates him and wants him killed for disturbing their paradise.
When our protagonist is stumped on how to destroy that unnatural Arcadian paradise, a bunch of woman trade that knowledge for a chance to be fecundated by that superior specimen, to create an even greater Übermensch. That elite and the protagonist couple escape the massacre.
The final scene is a time lapse of our couple raising a child from birth to their own deaths, living happily ever after, while Beethoven’s 7th plays on. BAM, the end, no credits since they were shown in the beginning.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.