Zardoz (1974)

"Visually striking cult film...  Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide

Editor's Note When Sean Connery abandoned the James Bond series to seek out new challenges, he turned to director John Boorman's sci-fi project, ZARDOZ. Connery stars as Zed, one of a carefully bred race of supervisors, the Exterminators, who oversee the agricultural labor of the neanderthal Brutals, since in 2293, with most of the Earth's surface off-limits as a polluted Outlands, industrial society has been abandoned. All worship Zardoz, a huge flying stone head who makes periodic visits to Earth to pick up grain consignments and issue bizarre statements involving the male anatomy through the voice of Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy). An increasingly skeptical Zed decides to stow away inside the head, which deposits him in the Vortex, a commune of scientists and intellectuals who are ruled by the ever-youthful and asexual Eternals. They capture Zed, allowing geneticist May (Sara Kestleman) to use him as a research subject for a limited period, but he begins to arouse more than scientific curiosity in the commune's supposedly nonsexual female population.

	Charlotte Rampling
	John Alderton
	Niall Buggy
	Sara Kestelman
	Sean Connery
	John Boorman - Director
	Geoffrey Unsworth - Director of Photography
	David Munrow - Musical Score
	John Boorman - Producer
	John Boorman - Writer

Director John Boorman's ZARDOZ presents the "perfect society" of the late 23rd century, in which no one dies and age is meted out as punishment. This way of life, however, is threatened when a man emerges from the barbaric multitudes and manages to break into the social order's encapsulated environment.