Kill James Bond! - [UNLOCKED] S3E10.5: Zardoz

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

A few months ago we held a poll to decide on our 5mil celebration episode, and the winner was Master and Commander. A close runner up and fan favourite was this, a classic punchline movie. Lmao it's Sean Connery dressed wierd hahaha. But what if I told you, it fucking ruled actually. This episode was held behind the iron paywall for three months, until we needed it most. Until hoarse voices cried out in terror- We're all too sick to record an episode of our podcast this week. John Boorman directed the movie Deliverance. Because of this, he was given access to 1.5 Million Quid and told to just fuckin make another movie. This is what he created... Zardoz.   ------ FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. Give money to people crowdfunding for passage out of Rafah first and foremost. While the crossing might be closed, the situation is changing by the day and being able to afford passage out when the crossing reopens is an immense comfort. then purchase ESIMs, then donate to this link if you feel you need a big name attached to the fund to trust it. Please don't only donate money. You have to do other things now. https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate ----- Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by Alice Caldwell-Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

The gun is good. The gun is good! The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men as once it was. But the gun shoots death and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. ALICE Hello and welcome back to the first episode of Kill James Bond, recorded in 2024.

I am Alice Caldor Kelly, I am joined, as always, by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. DEVON Hello, gentle listeners. ALICE How the hell are you doing? ALICE How are you, how are you, sort of, bearing up under the psychic assault of the twenty best seconds of Zardo's. RILEY Yeah, followed shortly by every other twenty seconds of Zardo's. RILEY Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ALICE It's true. A succession of twenty second moments where you think, SICK. RILEY Like, hell yeah. RILEY Yeah! Just, like, lay our cards down right at the start. ALICE Yeah, Zardo's rules! RILEY This rules!

This really rules! It's so good, I really liked it! RILEY This fucking ripped. Holy shit. Yeah, no, absolutely, let me just be absolutely upfront about this, I believe that Zardas is great. I had a great time. I believe this to be a good film, I'm glad I watched it, I enjoyed it.

It would be so easy for us to do a kind of nostalgia critic style, like, what the fuck, this movie's so weird. It's like, trippy, like, were they smoking weed when they made this? Using drugs? Yeah, yeah, maybe they were. Who gives a shit? It's a good film, I like it. They were.

And harder, canonically. This was all in the director's commentary. Oh, you've heard the director's commentary? Fantastic. I have not heard it. I have heard of it and I wanted to get to it before this episode, but I didn't have the time. We'll talk about it.

But the thing is, right, Zardo's has been on the docket for a long long time for the obvious reason which is, if you haven't seen it, you may have seen a picture from it, which is Sean Connery with a ponytail, a handlebar moustache, wearing a kind of like strappy red combat beach ensemble, holding a Webley Fosbury revolver. LWX Yeah, like if the Borat Mankini was being used in an amphibious assault. SONIA Yeah, so his fit in this is like, he's got some red above the knee riding boots, red Speedos, crossed red bandoliers, nothing else. See, he wears this for the entire movie.

LWX The whole movie. ALICE Very, very sort of prominent dick bulge, also. And you think, oh, that's funny, that's weird, it's interesting that Sean Connery did this, like, after Bond, after Diamonds Are Forever, right? What a fun little, like, additional bit of canon to Bond, that, like, the guy did this. It's in the same sort of space as Universal Soldier for Lazenby, right, where it's like, you get out of Bond, you do a weird one, and it's kind of funny and we can all laugh about it.

No, no. This is, I'm not gonna say it's not a weird movie, right? But it's trying to make points, it's trying to do something with this, and I engaged with it seriously, rather than sarcastically, and offering that level of sincerity to it, I really enjoyed it. LWIPE I think a lot of our movies we've talked about that you don't have to watch them before you listen to the episode, I think if you have the opportunity to watch Zardoz before you listen to this, I would recommend it more

than anything in the world. ZAROD Yeah, genuinely. Yeah. Do some drugs! LWIPE Going into that movie knowing what you're about to see next is gonna ruin it for you. And the experience is just being like, what can this man put in front of me? Yeah. I watched this movie Stone Cold Soba, I have to say, and I still very much enjoyed it. Well the thing is, right, this movie was like, it didn't do very well at the time.

And I think part of the reason why is that there's a technological disparity, right? Because they had the drugs available to make this movie, but they lacked the crucial technology of watching it with two, like, two to three clouted up transsexuals. Which is what I did, and having access to that technology really enhanced it. Oh yeah, the transsexual Discord server makes Zardoz the cinema that I think it was always meant to be. Definitely. I think if this inspires you... We should do a screening. We actually should, it would be great fun.

Genuinely, if this inspires you to do anything, it should be to institute a kind of clouted up transsexual movie night. I actually know somebody who does trans movie nights in London, we could do like a Zardo screening. Yeah, okay, yeah, offline this, we should 100% talk about this. So, to set the scene ever so slightly. This is back before the current media model of trapping promising young directors in the Marvel minds. At this time, the basic mode of the industry was you made one hit movie, you had

cart-bodge just to do whatever you wanted. So John Norman made the movie Deliverance and it was fantastic. We remember with the bit low down down down, the studio gave him one and a half million, and he did Zardo's. They gave him one and a half million and were like, do whatever the fuck you want. This movie cost one and a half million dollars to make? One and a half million. Is that it? What's that in today's money?

Could be Trimmy trying to fix that, give me a second here. One and a half billion dollars. I don't know. But the thing is, you can't go back, right? You can't go back to the 70s drugs. Like you can't even get Kweilud's anymore, the weed is too good. The weed's too strong now. Yeah, basically.

You wouldn't direct Zardoz, you'd just wanna have a little sit down. Yeah, this is the product of, and I'm not a drug person, so it's foolish for me to speculate about the precise intake of drugs that led to this movie being made, but I will say that a sine qua non for making this movie is the weakest, shittiest, most ditch weed in the world being smoked constantly. LH- 100%. You wanna all be on it. I just looked it up, one and a half million in 1974 is nine point six million dollars today. That is nothing by movie budgets! That's like,

I can't believe they made this for so little! And they did so much with it, right? It's incredible. Sean Connery must have done this for cheap as well, especially since he asked for a million for Diamonds Are My Pussy, or whatever it was. Well apparently he had difficulty getting work after Diamonds Are My Pussy. Which is, I don't think surprising, given first of all that the movie was called Diamonds and My Pussy. Which is, I don't think surprising, given first of all that the movie was called Diamonds and My Pussy, but second of all, because he's fucking James Bond, and second of all he's now looking old as fuck, so you

can't even really convincingly cast him as James Bond. Yeah, he's still aging into old man Connery. Knowing that Bormann originally considered Burt Reynolds to play Zed, it really does illuminate that the character was chest hair out. Yes. Yeah. Very masculine. Who's the hairiest motherfuck we've got?

Alright, we can't get him. Who's the second hairiest motherfuck? Sean Connery or me. Those were the three choices. Of course, nowadays it'll be me. Yeah. Mm. We begin with a sort of bouncing DVD logo of a guy's head.

I'm so glad that you wrote that as well. Yep, yep, yep, I was waiting for it to hit the corner. And this man is wearing a pair of blue silk underwear on his head. And this is Arthur Frayn, or Zardos, who introduces us to the fact that the movie is set 2293 in the distant future. See, he does this kind of like faux-Shakespearean monologue, and he's like, you know, my name is Arthur Frayn, or Xardos, I'm a fake god by occupation, and you will see my story play out over the course of this film."

And then he talks vaguely about film being a means of social control and the monologue ends with a line, is God in show business too? Which I was like, oh, okay. Huge inhale of the worst weed going up. It's got like Shakespearean chorus coming out and be like, this is what you'll see, and you know, for every man imagine a thousand, you know? It's good. Yeah.

And then it drops a kind of like, hair metal logo of the word Zado on screen. And we go to rural Ireland, where all of this was filmed, on the cheap. That's right. Where you're about to receive a message from the big giant head, and I- Big giant head arrives, my note says, huge fan of this fucking thing. I love the big giant head. So we're 2293, and there are men riding in the kind of red mankini things, and they're yelling, ZARDS! They're really excited, right?

And this giant stone head, which kind of looks a bit like the moon from Majora's Mask, descends from the sky and like, this is their god. ALICE King of all cosmos-y as well. RILEY Yeah, yeah, yeah. ALICE And the big giant head plays them the message that I played you at the beginning, the gun is good, the penis is evil. And then it- RILEY They sacrifice people to him. ALICE Yeah! They like, vomit a shitload of guns out of the mouth at them.

Yeah, fires guns out and goes, go kill! Just do some killing, lads. And honestly, like, first of all, this is one of a number of lines in the film which go insanely hard. And second of all, this is the moment where I realize, oh, we're like, we're up to something here. We've got themes. We might even have, like, multiple themes.

This is really cool. Like, but apparently we surmise that Xardas descends from the sky every now and again and gives these people the word of Xardas. Like, this is their fucking god, right? They want some deep green resistance shit, that they're like, take guns, go out, kill everyone you find. Yeah, he's doing, like, penis Malthusianism, right? Where these guys, the Exterminators, are controlling a population of Brutals.

I can't roll my... BRUTALS. ALICE Brutals. I'll talk about the Brutals later, but the thing about the Brutals is that they're just like, ordinary dudes, they're just dressed normal style. RILEY Completely standard type, guys. RILEY Yeah, ordinary dudes, they're just like, dressed normal style. LLOYD Completely standard type, guys. RILEY Yeah, Monty Python peasants, yeah, normal.

ALICE Yeah, exactly. And this is how they sort of like, run their society. But as the big giant head is taking off, having been filled with grain, and potatoes and shit... RILEY Because they also pay tribute to Zardoz, they give Zardo's grain and food and stuff and they sacrifice people. And then we get some Beethoven as the big giant head flies back up to the clouds and flies away. We love Beethoven's 7th symphony second movement.

We can't get that constantly throughout this whole fucking film. Inside the big giant head- It's very very cheap to use as a thing. Inside the big giant head, underneath a mound of grain, emerges Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Emerges the gun first, as well, I will say. The gun comes out, and then his arm, and then the rest of him. Very much.

Yeah. He has smuggled himself aboard, and he investigates the inside of this head, which is sort of largely lined with naked... Mint-conditioned women, in the original packaging and everything. That's right! Women wearing a kind of full-body condom. Shrink-wrapped, yeah.

LWX There's like, people inside wrapped in plastic, and they are alive! Yeah. And this is really funny, because he's investigating one of them, and there is a woman who is trying really, really hard not to start laughing, as Sean Connery with the chest hair out, is like, kind of poking at her plastic bag, and that moment, independent of the rest of the movie, the rest of the movie's good, this bit is like pure biggest dickest sketch. And I just really treasure it because this poor woman having to like, keep it together

is absolutely heroic. And I just wanted to shout that out. ALICE Fantastic. ALICE Yes. SONIA So he hides, as somebody walks past, he's up on some stairs at the top of the head, somebody walks past down below, and then this person looks out of the mouth with his back to Sean Connery, and Sean Connery shoots him in the back, and he turns around, and it's Arthur, the guy from the opening.

ALICE He's like, you didn't have to shoot me, this is so pointless. And then he falls out of the thing. SEAN He goes, bro, why did you shoot me for? Ooh! And then like floats out of the- RILEY He says, you fool! I could have told you so much!

And then he falls out of the mouth of the head and dies. And like, the head kind of flies on. And then it lands. ALICE Yeah, it takes Sean Connery to an Irish farmhouse, brackets weird. RILEY I fucking love this. Because this is all the context we've got. This is 2293. Sean Connery hasn't said a word yet. RILEY No. ALICE Not a word yet.

RILEY Yeah, like, the only thing, like, all we have Sean Connery hasn't said a word yet. But yeah, I'm- not a word yet. Yeah, like the only thing, like, all we have is his non-verbal acting to go off as like, this is weird to him, he's never seen anything like this. We're at this farmhouse, there's like horses, wagons. And it's all gun first too. Like he like opens doors with a gun, he like, you know, sort of gestures at things with the gun. He's like looking around, there's like seems to be a mill, he doesn't know what it is. It's like Commedia dell'Arte, he's led by the gun, he like, you know, sort of gestures at things with the gun. He's like, looking around, there's like, seems to be a mill, he doesn't know what it is.

It's like Commedia dell'Arte, he's led by the gun. Like, yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. There's like plants in plastic greenhouses and he goes inside and upstairs into what appears to be like, Zardoz's study? Goon cave. There's like, you know, books and stuff and like ornaments around, there's a mural on the wall, which is like, the Ascent of Man, like chimp, and then the kind of like, guys like Bigger and then-

Chimp, man, podcaster, yep. Professor Chimp, man, podcaster, Eternal. But there's an extra one on the end, there's an extra one on the end which says Eternal, so this is just kind of in the background, we're not told this, but what we surmise from this is that Xardos is fucking fake. Mmhm. What we surmise from this is that Xardos is fucking fake. ALICE Yeah. He turns over a couple of books and he finds a ring, which operates kind of like Xardos's iPhone.

It just shows him his shopping list, which, because it's the future, has like, apples with a Z on it and stuff. RILEY That's right. It's got like, Siri inside it, there's like a voice that's just like, these are the supplies for Vortex 4. And it's like, just telling him shit. He's like, got no idea what the fuck any of this means. And then this is where we get his first lines where he goes like, food, and it like projects an image of some food and he goes meat, and it projects an image of some meat. He tries to grab it. And then he says, who lives here? And it projects an image of Arthur. And he's like shocked, because he's like, no, you're

dead. So we get this, he's like a fucking caveman, like he doesn't know what the fuck any of this is. And it's genuinely very well acted. ALICE Yeah. Genuinely. The thing about Sean Connery is he's just not a bad actor, bad person. Not a fucking actor.

RILEY He's really good in his scene. And I'm completely on board, I'm like, yeah man, who the fuck are you? What the fuck is any of this? RILEY He's just walking I'm like, yeah, man, who the fuck are you? What the fuck is any of this? He's just walking around this like wizards dungeon. There's like fucking crystal shit on the walls. It's like the Aquarius signs and stuff. And he's just picking things up and looking at it and like breaking it in his hand and

going, oh shit. And I wrote, I went into a crystal shop one time to find tarot cards and I acted basically exactly like this. Yeah. Correct response to crystals. So yeah, he pokes around some more, he sees a flower for the first time and he's like, what is this for? And the ring tells him that this is decorative, and he's like, huh?

RILEY I like this a lot, because the ring just goes, he points at this thing and he goes, what is this? And the ring goes, flower. And he's like, what for? And it goes, decorative. And my note is like, does the ring have a personality and it's attenuating the amount of information it gives to him? Because like, it doesn't make any sense for the ring to just identify flowers and not the species. So it's like, talking down to him actively?

ALICE And literally, yeah. RILEY As you find out, it is, yeah. But he sees some people and he hides, including a topless woman on a horse. There's a lot of tits in this movie. ALICE There are? It was- RILEY There's an immense amount of tits in this movie. ALICE The 70s. You know?

And the more I say that about this movie, the more I want to go back. RILEY I mean, there was- can I say something? ALICE Please. RILEY I went- Saltburn. I've heard a lot about Saltburn, because there's Barry King's dick in it, briefly. And I had a look for this, and it's like nothing, you barely see anything. And I've been getting cock-teased about seeing actors' dicks for quite some time, and I've been watching a lot of 70s shit, and I can tell you, every single movie, no matter what,

there is at least one pair of tits. And I want the 2020s and 2030s to be that, but for cock, we need to get to the point, no matter the genre, I got one hangin' deal. RILEY That's what Game of Thrones was! GEOFF Yeah, exactly! ALICE I have a slightly divergent opinion, right, which is, cinema fell, right, cinema stopped being good.

RILEY That's right, we can all agree on this. Yeah, I can date this specifically. 1979, when they airbrushed Sigourney Weaver's pubic hair out of Alien. Did they? You're so right. They did! She had massive pubes, and they, like, painstakingly paid a shitload of money to individually airbrush her pubes out of the fucking movie. Yeah. Why? Because of misogyny. Oh, because of misogy pubes out of the fucking movie. Yeah.

Why? Yeah. Because of misogyny. Oh, because of misogyny. Because of misogyny. Now... Huh. Never said.

Where was I going with this? So yeah, 1979- They should've put the bush back and more dicks, alright, and that's Kill James Bond 2025. Yeah, the airbrushed Sigourney Weaver's gock out of Alien. Put that on the fucking t-shirt, 100 point font, put the bush back in the movies. And I cock. Well when they do reboot Ripley and they cast me, then I'll make sure we do cockbugs, and we'll rectify this.

So my note for this just says I have 2293 woman dysphoria. Because he sees a vision of a woman, and he points the gun at her, but she does like Professor X shit, we surmise that these people in this society have some kind of psychic ability, so she disarms him, and then she's like, who the fuck are you, where are you, what are you doing here, how did you get here? You're from out there, right, beyond this, like, protected vortex of, like, hippie commune. Yeah. She calls him a brutal, as well, which I think is interesting. The class division he's grown up

with, the one of brutals below exterminators, is not seen by the people above him who think they're all brutals. Interesting. And he's... Calling a cop a pleb. He says, oh, I guess I'm in the afterlife. Zardo says, when you die, if you're loyal to him, you are sent to the vortex and there you live forever. And she's like, so you think you're in the afterlife? And he doesn't answer this.

So they, they scan his mind to these two women who are May, the scientist who finds him and Consuela, who is kind of our villain. Charlotte Rampling. Consuela, who is kind of our villain. Charlotte Rampling. Consuela. Hello. Hello. Unfucking believable. The neck on this woman.

Some of these shots. Yeah, so they look inside his mind, and what's inside his mind is what he's been doing as an exterminator, which is... Clues in the name. Yeah, pretty much. Sort of like, hunting down and shooting and burning and raping. This is the, like, this movie has a lot about rape in it, right, and I wanna put that, like, up front now, cause we're gonna have to talk about it a lot.

It's like a key theme of the movie, and it doesn't necessarily handle it very well, but on the other hand I am interested in the way that it tries. SONIA Hmm. Which doesn't say that it's good, so I guess Sean Connery's filmography is improving? ALICE Yeah, that's right. But yeah, no, they see his memories of raping a woman in the course of his exterminating, and they're both very troubled by this.

SONIA Consuelo wants him to be destroyed, she's like, like, fucking kill this thing right now, they call him it, and they're like, kill it now, and they also talk about like, what the fuck was Arthur doing in the outlands? ALICE Yeah, they test this a bit, and they find that what he's been doing, in part, is making the exterminators start enslaving the Brittles and making them start farming and planting corn and stuff, and this is where some of their food has been coming from. And again in lines that go really hard, right, Consola kind of like questions this.

"-The Outlands have to be controlled." "-I've always voted against forced farming." "-You eat the bread." And it's like, yeah, okay, shit, we're talking about complicity and extractive resource systems and colonialism then. Yeah. Consuelo even says we shouldn't know how the outside world operates. It's just like, we should kill him now, this is going to introduce a discordant element

into our community, just get rid of him. But Mei is like, no, I want him- These images will pollute us. Yeah. Which is a familiar discourse. Yeah. You know? Mei wants to know how Sean Connery got there. So they actually, they place some of his memories for the entire community. This like hippie community.

They get him all- the set design is so fucking good. It's really cool. I tend to think of the Vortex, and this will increase as we go on, as like a kind of woke house share. I 100% have some notes to that. Well, it's interesting that everyone in the Vortex is white. Isn't it though. Isn't it.

I have a further note about this, which is Serendipitous, which is that the Brutals, and the extras playing the Brutals, all Irish travellers. And cast that way, because Bormann the director, like, thought they looked like they were, y'know, like, working people. And I think, sort of, accidentally racialises the thing much more explicitly than he means to. Yeah. So they play some of his memories from the community, and some people are kind of repelled by this, some people are curious or surprised.

They're also, we also surmise that Arthur was controlling the outlands for this community kind of without much oversight, because people are like, what was he doing out there? None of the other ones wanted to, like, give a shit about the outside, so he was the only one doing it. Yeah. There's some more here too, because they're not just shocked and surprised, they're also fascinated. Interested.

Yes! There is, particularly again, by the rape, right? And these are mostly women, or at least, like, let's say, women, female presenting nipples, I don't know. There's a lot of femmes involved, yeah. There are some male presenting nipples as well. The men in this community are very kind of feminized, yeah. That's true.

We'll talk about that some more later. But so, yeah, people are like watching the footage of this rape, of this atrocity, and being kind of like, allured and fascinated and to an extent maybe aroused by it. There's a little bit of like, Oryx and Crake stuff going on here too. So they said to Sean Connery, like, tell us about this. And he says, you know, my name is Zed. I was named Zed for Zardoz. I'm an exterminator. I kill brutals for Zardoz. I love the way they flee. I love the way they die. It is when I feel one with Zardoz, I love the way they flee, I love the way they die, it is when I feel one with Zardoz,

I took a woman in his name." Like, he's like a caveman, basically. Oh, so he wants them to believe. ALICE Yeah. And one of the few men, question mark, in the- RILEY I love this man so much. In the Wokehouse share. Friend. Yes. Incredible Roman physignomy on this guy. Like, bam. Oh, yeah, with the aquiline nose. Yeah, he kind of like, flirts with him in what he imagines as a kind of like, patronizing

way. He like, drapes his arm around him, as if to show off this monster. He calls him monster. And then licks his hand. Which is, first of all, I didn't know that Sean Connery had that kind of homoeroticism in him. I know, we could've pushed him so much further, couldn't we? Yeah.

I'm trying to lobby Sean Connery to get Gaia. Second of all, this is by far the horniest moment in a movie that includes an orgy. There's real, like, fucking allure in this. Right? I really like Sean Connery's acting in this, because he's clear, even at this stage where he's doing the caveman thing, it's clear that he is playing dumb. He doesn't say much. You could tell he's fucking thinking. It's really well

acted that he is pretending to be dumber than he is. And they vote, the community votes, they vote on everything wee-sumized. ALICE Oh, by the way, just as an extra house-share thing, they vote with their hands, and the cuntiest hand motions I've ever seen. RILEY Yeah, yeah, it's really cool. GARETH I need to get in on this voting shit, because it seems like all of them just, like, do and they just like, the voting has evolved to such a point in the society that they basically just all give their opinion and then someone there does the like, eyes roll back in their

head and just presents like an average of everyone's opinions. Psychically tallies it, yeah. It's really interesting. It's like voting by interpretive dance. Or like they vogue and then, you're right Dev, like somebody who is... it's really cool, like somebody, the psychic lady who he saw topless on the horse, Avalo, presents this kind of like, this is the majority opinion. And so they vote to keep him alive for three weeks.

To allow Mei to study him. And they give him a job, right, they give him some menial labour. They keep him in a cage with the animals. They do. Complete with some like, they give him some menial labour. They keep him in a cage with the animals. They do. Complete with some animal noises in the background. And the job is, he's lifting and carrying four friend. And friend works in the statue graveyard from GoldenEye, where he, or, you know, equilibrium, where he's like, yeah, check out all these old statues of like, gods and queens and kings and shit, they all died of boredom.

Mm. Friend is bored. Yeah. What there is, is like, eternal life, and luxury, in the house share. Yes. He tries to explain the, like, set up of this, he's like, listen, we live forever, right? But, we can age, and the aging is sentences that are passed down for our misdemeanours and crimes. He's sort of like, he's harnessed Sean Connery into a kind of pony play set up at this point,

and so Sean Connery is like, dragging him on a cart. He's on like a litter. Yeah, and he explains that like, you know, this being a house share, there's no cops, there's no police, which that is sort of baffled by. And it's like, no, we mostly just do like call outs and house meetings. So we also see that one of the members of the community, and I really like the way this film shows rather than tells, that one of the members of the community is on trial for bad vibes.

Yeah, for bad vibes! Yeah, for bad vibes! He's there, and I'm guilty of emitting a negative aura in the fourth level. Yeah! He's like, as you say, he's on trial for emitting the bad vibes and making people feel unsafe. And he's like, I'm not doing that. Actually, my vibes are good. He says, I am innocent of psychic violence. Which is another hard life. He says, if I thought bad things about our society, it is because they were constructive criticisms.

And over the course of these few scenes we see that the members of the community are voting on what to be done with this guy. Voting counterly, yeah. And Friend says, oh, he'll almost certainly be found guilty, they'll age him as punishment. And then Sean Connery's like, what if you kill yourself? ALICE Oh, I have a drop really strongly of- SEAN CONNERY Give me that again, Hull. ALICE I was saving that, right?

Because I have determined the way to make the worst button in the history of drops, so just at random, let's just select at random, I can just hit her. Come. I have come. Kill yourself. You have penetrated me. Kill yourself. You have penetrated me.

Stop it. Thank you. Kill yourself. There's so much penetration in this fucking movie. We'll talk about that a little bit down the way when we finish setting up the society. Sean Connery says, what if you kill yourself you kill yourself and friend says, I have a couple of times, but if we do the tabernacle, which is that kind of AI computer that runs everything, the eternal tabernacle, just resurrects us reconstructed. And we actually saw earlier on that Arthur is dead and is being reconstructed as like

an embryo inside a plastic bag. Yeah. They can't even fucking die. Because if they do, they just get automatically brought back. That's right. So yeah, at this point, we have to see two groups of people. fucking die, because if they do they just get automatically brought back. That's right. So, yeah. At this point, we have to see... Two groups of people.

Yeah. The apathetics first, we'll talk about. These are the people who are so frustrated by the society and so overwhelmed by the society and realizing that they can't... Get yourself. That they've just kind of ceased to exist internally. They just stand around. Yeah, they just stand around.

Like, a friend offers one of the women to Zed, who like, immediately picks her up, and goes to rape her, as is his want, and is disgusted and won't, because she can't not consent. Like she's just kind of a sex doll. You won't do it, he's not woke. He's just not woke. Exactly. He's like, it's not even fun, because it's not rape, and then he finishes that by perfectly over-arm throwing her into a haystack. This throw is one of the funniest moments in the movie, easily.

It's so good. It's quite a serious point about sexual violence, and then he just ends it by just chucking a woman. Because he discards her, right, and it's symbolic, but also the way he discards her is an overarm throw where she keeps her legs completely straight it's just like arcs over and it's incredible. But these these apathetics they just stand around they don't and they don't move you can kind of push them over or move them they just kind of stand there staring into space. Frend says this is a growing problem in all the vortices this is like spreading and we don't know what it is. You've been growing the food for these people because

we don't want to fucking take care of them, right? And at this point, George, the guy who's on trial has found guilty of bad vibes, he's aged five years. And so we meet the renegades. So yeah, these are the people who in the vortex have been bad, right? They've given off sufficient bad vibes, that they've been punished, and the way they've been punished is by keeping them alive, preventing them from dying, but aging them. So they're all like... Senile. Yeah. And like, old in the kind of, like, it's like kind of like Brazil, kind of like body horror

of age kind of thing. They're all like extremely grey, they've got like cobwebs and shit. They've just been sentenced to enough crimes that over time they've become immortal and senile and- Yeah, and they crave death. Yeah, they all live in this big house, like an old folks home, which I don't know, I find this scene to be a little bit distressing because it's a little bit ageist, I think. Sure, of course.

And just having had relatives who've had dementia and have had to live in care, it's very upsetting. It's upsetting both because like it's not something that I would want. I don't think anybody wants to get dementia, but at the same time, the way we think about it is often very distressing as well. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. I've been thinking about like disability and aging in that way. I think we often view it as having you lose something and it's like, well, I don't know, it's a different way of thinking

and a different way of being. But to view people who have dementia as like essentially broken or pitiable, or like you are essentially kind of like less of a person. I remember somebody in my family had dementia and then died after a long time. And someone else said, oh, well, she was basically dead already.

And I think that's just, that kind of attitude really opens the door to elder abuse. Oh, a hundred percent. And it's the attitude that's in this movie. Like these people explicitly want Sean Connery to like go through that old folks on like the Canadian healthcare system. Like fuck me to pieces.

And the other thing is, no one in this society is old and not senile. This is every old person in the society. Senility is just one to one associated with aging. ALICE So Consuelo is kind of like, testing him, as well, at this point. ZOE So having established what the society is and that it's decaying, then... ALICE We have to find out that they do is and that it's decaying, then...

We have to find out that they do not fuck. Then we get the porn scene! Yes! Where they're like, tell us three anti-racist things you've done before you can join the public! Yeah, do you think of yourself as an exterminator when you masturbate? So what she does is she puts him in front of a big screen, and she's like... This is like a classroom setting, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Naked! And she's like, yeah. Nobody gets hard anymore. We aren't getting hard. I'm just gonna hit the drop. You have penetrated. No?

Come now. There we go, there's a come one. Yeah, so no one gets hard, no one comes anymore, because they're all too woke. Yes. And they've kind of lost access to the physiological process, which as she says in a kind of like, interestingly radfem way, a violent convulsive act which destroyed women and betrayed men. Right? Yeah. So they understand the physiological process of an erection, but they don't really

understand the kind of psychological thing. She thinks it's something to do with like violence or control. That's what it has to be about, right? Because they don't really understand the kind of psychological thing. She thinks it's something to do with like violence or control. That's what it has to be about, right? Because they don't experience sexual desire. Everyone in the polygual is ace. But they're like Sean Connery, not asexual. You're like, this guy can get hard. So they bring him up in front of the rest of the polygual. Yeah, they bring him up and then they're like, let's make this guy hard.

Yeah. And they show him some like sensitive, ethically made pornography. They all stare at his cock and they go Yeah. And they show him some like, sensitive, ethically made pornography. They all stare at his cock and they go, alright, show him some porn. They legitimately do show him some sensitive, ethically made pornography. And it gets nothing from him. It's like, very soft lighting and lots of like, emotional plot lines. Well, so, I really want to zoom in on this, figuratively. Please.

Because she talks about like, we're gonna like, erotically stimulate him and measure his brain waves and see what makes his dick hard. And it's really interesting that the stuff that they show him is erotic in the Susan Sontag sense. And they've kind of misunderstood what eroticism is, because the two things they show him are soapy tits and two women covered in mud. And like Susan Sontag says, the essence of eroticism is palpability. And that's why things like latex, water, mud, and bubbles, like, because they give you a powerful feeling of what it would be like to touch that surface. Right. And so they have a kind of like very literal minded understanding of what eroticism is.

And so that's the stuff that they show him. I just think it's perhaps fortuitous or perhaps like very, very clever that they chose to use this specific pornography to show him. But it has no effect. It has no effect. Yeah, genuine. But what does have an effect? Just show him a bunch of fanboys.

Yeah, they didn't know how to... It's all straight. It's just like tits and like women like writhing around in the mud. They didn't know that they had to show him a free use twink. It's true. They've lost that technology. They didn't. They hadn't invented hentai in the future. They hadn't invented hand tie in the vortex.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You should show this man a trick with the rosy, be like, that guy looks familiar. No, but so, what they have is a little polygraph style line that, like, measures how hard his dick is, right? And the thing clicks off, and Charlotte Rampling is like, Charlotte Rampling-ly posh English-ly just like... It's so like the gender identity clinic. Oh, he's not getting hard! And he immediately goes like, Charlotte, rampingly posh English-ly just like... It's so like the gender identity clinic. Oh, he's not getting hard.

And he immediately goes like, boing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Posh English woman disapproves of me for not being able to get hard. Oh! Diamonds. This is a relatable experience, right? Um... Yeah.

It happens to the best of us, man. She's standing there like a Holland Cooper model being like, what does that dick do? Nothing apparently. And he's like, I'll show you. He's literally just looking. And we see his face the whole time. He is staring straight at Charlotte Rampling. There's nothing going on on his face, but we hear like the equivalent of a like slide

whistle that is to show this man now has a bone. So they don't cut down and show us. They don't show it. They don't show us her photos. But what happens is all the people like standing around, look down and start laughing and start laughing at Consuelo as well. And it's interesting. I also really love the way she fucking acts this.

She knows enough about sexuality to be offended by this. She has no lines. Yeah. It's a sexual humiliation. We see in her face that she is like disgusted by this. And it's this very interesting hint that like, this society knows more than they pretend to. And that like, it's not that they don't know what sexuality is, it's that they are disavowing it. And even this scene

in which they are studying his dick, is them doing that in such a way as to kind of perform this ignorance of sex, which keeps them pure. 100%. So, May finally gets to study him. And this is one of the funniest- Welcome to the room. Shots in the movie where he just kind of gets sucked into a prism. Big fan of that. Just gets sucked into a prism.

Both arms throw out like, whoo! He gets sucked into the prism. Yeah, and she sort of like- They refract my boy! Yeah, they refract him, and they're like, well wait a second, wait a second here, there's something fucking weird about this. There's more going on than you've been telling us. And she's trying to figure out, she clearly already suspects, but she's trying to figure

out what happened to Zardos, and he's trying to withhold that memory from her. And in the course of so doing, I think this is the bit where she discovers that he is like, he's actually Solid Snake. Like, because Zardos has been doing this program of, like, state building, Zardos has been doing historical progressivism, which is a very funny thing to be doing. ROGUE. He's gone rogue! Yeah, he's just, like, eugenically bred, like, the best exterminator, which is Zed. As he said earlier, my parents were chosen to breed, right? And so because of that he's smarter and stronger, and he poses a kind of grave threat to the

society. Yeah, like, their assumptions about the racial inferiority of everyone outside their polycule are being challenged here. Yes. The polycule is facing a kind of nuclear level callout. Well that is indeed what happens in the next scene. I just want to talk very briefly about the set for this room, because they're inside this prism here and he's lying on a table, and it's these glass walls that there are

just nude women just lying on and water is flowing down and around them, and I don't understand what's trying to be said here, because like, it's women's bodies used as set dressing so there's something interesting here but I literally don't understand the purpose which it's been done. Okay, I don't either. I think this might just actually be women's bodies as set dressing like I can't think of what it's supposed to symbolize here I think it is just like this is future time shit. I think that's meant to be the people who are growing and being reconstructed because we've seen-

Is it? That makes so much sense. The naked people in the plastic bags on the other side of glass before, as the new people are being grown. So I think that's just- Oh, you've solved that for me actually. There's a lot of nudity in this, like men and women. And I remember the bits you're talking about, and there's men there too.

I think it's just, those are like, just people being, new people being grown. Okay, that makes more sense to me. So that's inside for sort of Tabernacle. Oh, cause it's inside for Tabernacle. Alright, yeah. I'm back in the room. So we got to talk about the nuclear level call out that is coming. Right?

So, Zed is like serving- This is the last thing you want to hit your polycule. Zed is like, serving... ZED'S SON IS LAST THING YOU WANT TO HIT YOUR POLICUAL. ZED IS SERVING. He is, but he's serving them all their, like, communal dinner. Yes or no to potatoes. Well, could his friend's turn to cook, and he has to do it for the next thousand years? Chorwheel drama. Chorwheel, chorwheel.

It's always the thing that fucking gets you. Genuinely, I wrote Chorwheel. Cause they're telling him that it's not fair for him to make Zed cook. Yeah, like, it's your turn to cook, you can't make the Brutal do it. Yeah, exactly. And he's like, this is bullshit, I hate AFABs. He literally, like...

He does say this. He says, he says... I hate all women. Because... He does. Like, there's, like, serious discord in the Policule, in the, like, house share, at this point. Yeah, because of the apathetics, like, there are, societally, things are happening that cannot be ignored any further, but everyone wants to ignore them except friend.

And he gets the brunt of their psychic powers. Yes, and what they do is they subject him to the twink death penalty. RILEY They mind meld altogether, they do what they call meditating at the second level, which they sort of stand up and they wiggle their fingers and they all speak with one mind. ALICE This is very funny to watch. This is one of the sillier bits, visually.

RILEY This is what would kill you if you were on any sort of hallucinogen. This is at the 54 minute mark, it would kill anyone you-" Mmhm. Clip of that would help you to do the kind of like, Nostalgia Critic review of like, this is a silly movie. It is! Okay, so, since we brought up this bit, um, I...

This is silly, but this is, um, where I've written, this is kind of like drama school. I wrote this down too! I said it looked like a drama school exercise. It's in my very words that I wrote down. This film is a little bit silly and it is a little bit, at times, like something you'd see drama school students do. It actually reminded me most of my drama school master's piece that I made in that it's like a little bit goofy, made on a shoestring budget, but it is sincere. And it's like, okay, if you want to show a room full of people joining in one mind and then expelling one person psychically, how would you actually do that with no budget?

How else would you do it other than this? They wiggle their fingers and you get a bunch of actors and they completely fucking commit to it. And like, yeah, okay, it's a little bit goofy, but I think in an age where we're obsessed with calling things cringe and refusing to engage with things, I really respect the hell out of them for doing this, and I like this scene, I thought it was good, it was effective. ALICE So Friend does not suffer twink death easily, right? He's like, I will not get in the sort of, like, accountability process with you.

SONIA Yeah, he's a renegade, he's gone renegade. ALICE I won't let you fucking wiggle your fingers at me. Like, accountability process with you. Yeah. He's a renegade. He's gone renegade. I won't let you fucking wiggle your fingers at me. And they age him up. They age him out of twinkdom, you know? They put him in the old folks' home with the other renegades. They do. Connery goes to see him, and they all try and kill him for a bit.

They all want to die. This man has the gift of death, another hard line. Un-fucking-believable. When Zed goes to the old guys, it's not a room, it's more like a gazebo, right? It's the old guys' cotillion, right? They're all in this room, they've got the banners and stuff. He goes in there, he's like, does anyone know where Friend is? And Friend has this wonderful fucking prosthetic makeup where he's got one half of his face is old, like his eyebrows get bushy as they go across him, it's really, really good. And he's acting the fuck out of us at this point. He's pulled all of his like cheese seals out. He's been in the

drama exercise and he's just going for it now. And he sets the old people on Zed horde mode style. This is a fucking scene in a movie that you can watch. You can just do it! It's so good! ALICE So, I don't know if I fully believe this, right, but one of the people I was watching this with interpreted this scene differently from me and said they thought this was kind of like turning the lens of rape on him, right? Because they're all surrounding him, they all want him, but what they want him for is death, right? Because they're all surrounding him, they all want him, but what they want him for is death, right?

RIght. Like, this guy can die. Yeah, exactly. We wanna see it. Exactly. So, I don't know if I buy that necessarily, but I think it's an interesting way of thinking about it. That is interesting. And, yeah, he is, like, surrounded by them, he has to fight them off. Mm-hmm.

And... I've read We Used to Make Movies, so... fight them off. And we used to make movies. Well, he also even meets the founder of their society. Yes. Who is senile, paralyzed, renegade. And they're like, how do we shut the society down? None of us could die. We need to end this. It's fucked.

But like nobody can remember even how to stop the wheels turning in a society. And so the founder of our society says, go and talk to me. Yeah. The founder of our society by the guy, a guy called George Sadden, played by Bosco Hogan. And I really want to highlight the name Bosco Hogan. Also, really, really, really hard line where he shames all of them. He says, fight for death if that's what you want. So- So he goes to see Mei and she- Yeah, and Mei throws a sheet over him because there's no budget, right?

Cool. All right? Cool. Alright. Yeah. I'm on board. I'm Zardo's Pills. This is good. She brings him into a cocoon with him. Fuck it, that's what happens.

It's good! Who am I to say this is goofy? When I was in drama school, I lived in the woods for a week and forgot what cars were, okay? Like, I can't fault them for this. You Jason Bournes yourself, I remember, yeah. Yeah, Abi actually comes from a The Village situation. So they sort of mind-meld, right?

And she finally sees, he finally either lets her see or she forces it out of him, that he has killed Zardo, and as she says, you murdered your own god by mistake. Which is fucking insanely hard. So he reveals that, like, for years I was an exterminator, I killed fazardos, that was enough, he says. But one day... He still had to make us do this woke farming shit. Well yeah, also, it was weird, he made us take slaves and farm, we thought that was weird, because we're meant to be hunters, not farmers, but okay. He says, one day, I found a guy in a

library, and I tried to kill him, but he disappeared. So it's like a post-apocalyptic British library, by the way. Yeah, he showed me a book, and Zed learned to read. And he said, I read everything in the library, I learned about the history of the world that came before, and she eventually forces it out of him, she said, what was the him. She's like, what was the first book he showed you? What was the book? It's like the last book he gets to. It's like the last one. I didn't know this. I didn't see this coming. This is such a fucking good reveal. I want to stop you right now. Watch the fucking movie. Watch the movie. Pause it. Yeah. Seriously watch it.

Then come back. We're giving you two seconds to assume that you've watched it, and now we're gonna spoil the movie. This is it, this is the spoiler coming, I'm gonna hit a random drop button to give you a bit of emotional clearance. There you go. Yeah. I'm gonna fuckin' kill that cunt. Oh shit, no.

There it is. I have come! What the last book he read, that allowed him to figure out his situation was The Wizard of Oz. WIZARD OF OZARDOZ! He covers the word of on the cover and it's like, FUCK IT SAYS ZARDOZ! In a moment of perfect clarity, he sees through his entire society by reading The Wizard of Oz and goes, holy fuck, they're just doing this.

They Wizard of Oz'd me! Thank God! Yeah. He gets it! It's so good! The Matrix is real for this guy. I stood up, man! This reveal is incredible! He says, I told my friends about it, I told my friends about the book, and we conspired

to find the truth. We buried me inside the head to find out what the fuck was going on. And she's like, did you come for revenge, or did you come for the truth? And he isn't really sure, like, a little bit of both. ALICE Yeah, she forces him to revenge, is the thing he ultimately ends up saying, because the other exterminators outside the periphery of the thing, having followed the big giant head on horseback, and are seeking, like, they're waiting on him to open the barrier and let them in to, like, make war on heaven.

Right? And at this point... So they're exhausted, they're lying under the sheet, they kiss, and Consuelo catches them. And is like, that is bestiality. So that's the word she uses. Exactly, yeah. You're fucking this guy who is an animal, you know?

And you fuck your bestie. You fuck bestiality with your bestie. LH- I said this a while ago, that tea for tea lesbianism is just travelling back and forth across the country with a series of different animal ears? LH- Sexuality in the new thing is like an incest kink, and I mean, obviously I would never participate in any... Since when? I dunno, like last year, I think.

The dying months of last year, just like, it became a thing that everyone was in. Really? That's such a shame. The porn thing finally broke through. It did! The stepsister got stuck in the washing machine in our hearts. ALICE I don't know what happened. Maybe it's like, the Folgers commercial, maybe...

I dunno. ZACH Might have been the Folgers commercial. ZACH Vladimir Nabokov is logging on. ALICE Yeah, just to do the thing, like, the pious, kind of like, the best thing about being queer is you can choose your family thing, except it's the best thing about being queer, is you can choose your family and then have sex with them. No, I think that you are conflating a mommy slash daddy kink with incest.

I'm not, I am not. I think there's not, like, I don't think that's an incest thing. No, no, no, I'm a different thing. Different thing. Now I mean, I'm an only child, so this stuff is like, you know, much easier for me, it's not complicated. It's not guesswork involved in the characterisation though. Like you're struggling to like, find a place of authenticity for the character.

I should never have come! I learned a lot about acting, and, yeah, no. I was like, going with this. So Consuela is like, she kick-shames them. And because Zed is still an exterminator, he tries to grab her and rape her, at least I think it's filmed that way, and she turns the kind of blinding psychic violence, the bad vibes, on him. Yeah, she does the Professor X thing, and he resists for a while, which is interesting.

Yeah, but in a thing about the violent convulsive act that betrays men, right? In the course of doing this he is blinded, which is themes. And he wakes up under the care of the psychic girl from earlier, the one who does all the speaking for the group. ALICE Yeah. And then Avalo. ALICE Avalo. Who is, she, like, heals him and she gives him the kind of the neo-speech, right?

RILEY She does this all-ed out, of course. Yeah, of course. Which is to say, you are the one, I think he's literally the one, who is gonna like, destroy our society and free us from this like, self-imposed prison. She shows him a vision of how their society began, she said, um, the earth was like falling into ruin, a great time of darkness was coming. And so we, the rich, the powerful and the clever, shut ourselves away and became immortal. Explicit climate stuff. Yeah. We see this vision of the barriers coming down and all these sort of the brutals

stuck on the outside trying to get in. Irish travellers. All being turned away. And they became the Eternals. And the people who actually founded this society have since gone renegade and been aged up, so the people who are living there now, all the people that we've met, are like, their children, who've never really known anything else. Yeah, it's their offspring who are like, true believers. It's almost like living in these kinds of, you know, extremely, like, carceted, safe environments is very spiritually stifling, but because

you personally weren't responsible for instituting them, you feel kind of, like, trapped between those things. And you're awaiting a kind of wave of third world violence to liberate you from the... yeah. Yeah. Now this violence that they've externalized has come back to Biden. I know. It's come back to Biden. Yeah, so, and it's interesting because pretty soon after this you see, and again, Charlotte

Ramplong. So Consuela, the thing that she said earlier about these images being the thing that pollutes us, and she's right about that and the movie takes a position that's a good thing, right, but like, that immediately happens. She immediately becomes warlord Consuelo, she's riding around everywhere on horseback with a sword with her tits out. ALICE Bearback! Which, why not say, would love to be hunted through the woods by a beautiful woman on

a horse. ALICE Yeah, I also wrote that down verbatim. But she's like, right, we're gonna- she leads the Eternals to find Shogun, find him, attack him, he hides with the the Apathetics, and they like, the Eternals are- they've gone fucking feral at this point. They're like, fight ye not, dragons, or you become a dragon yourself. And they stop burning shit down. Horny as hell. Yeah! They lick his sweat, and they're like, damn, this is a girl who stinks good.

Me after KJB live shows, because they're just like, they are all about it, he is surrounded by women. He's surrounded, well, not even just women, again, it's an entire social class, so it's men there as well. The woman who he tried to rape earlier on, like picks a bead of sweat off him as he's hiding and like licks it and then like seems to recover somewhat. She kisses a bunch of other people. We've got gay kissing going on and like this awakening is like spreading through the after sex.

Yeah, 1975, she gets the awakening. She kisses another woman. That woman turns to a man. That man turns to a man. Each of these kiss in turn and and like, it's quite something to put in your movie, actually. Truly. They are, they even say that we take life from you, they're like, the apathetics are starting to recover. Yes. I will, I will complain, however. This entire society is tiddy out, but nobody's got honkers.

Like it's all very flamboyant. I have a theory about this, right, because there's ages of tits in movies, right? Because there was like, this until like, 1975, this came out in 1974, so the history of tits in movies is like 1890 to 1975, where it was just like regular normal tits that you grew as a human, right? And then 1975 to about like 1995 is the era of like first gen boob job, the ones where they kind of like float on water and very round. And then after that is like gen 2, 3, 4 boob job, where it like looks more natural but larger.

And so I think each of those generations has affected our views of beauty, right? Which one of those generations has Hunter Schafer's tits that make me want to kill myself? That's gotta be the most contemporaneous one. Yeah, that's contemporary boob job, yeah. This is the thing, I kind of want the like, gen ones, you know? I want the like- Bringing it back? OG tits. Yeah!

I want the like, flotation devices, you know, I want the like- You're bringing it back? OGT- Yeah! I want the like, flotation devices, you know? Like I've got the build for them, I think that it would be, you know, it would be fulfilling, but- Do you think it would make the podcast better? Because I could see it as a business experience. Yeah! Listen, my podcasting is tied directly- my podcasting skill is tied directly to breast size, that's why it got better when I transitioned.

Did you have to position the microphone slightly further away? I'm a lot more open about this after I got that BBL last season. It really did improve my podcasting. That's the only person on this podcast who has had cosmetic surgery during the course of recording the podcast. It is not. It's not a business expense and it also made recording the episode immediately afterwards difficult because I was in a lot of pain.

Yeah, it's just, but you had to do it. Yeah, yeah. So Sean Corer is running away and then when he gets back, the apathetics are all fucking. They're fucking. Fucking like crazy. They are fucking on each other. They're fucking like crazy. One of them tells them about this. They're fucking like crazy.

One of them tells them about this, because they're just like, yeah, we all got horny and we found a guy and it wasn't him, but we killed him anyway. Yeah. Because they crave violence. It's like Ballard, the suburbs dream of violence, well, you know, the Vortex dreams of violence. They dream of the thing that wakes them into a more passionate world, right? I'm so glad you made that connection. Yeah, and so, he's fleeing through this, like, civil war in heaven, and he runs into the

renegades, and friend, and... They dress him up as a bride? Yes they do! To smuggle him to the castle? Yes they fucking do! This is another bit where you can show the image and be like, oh, it's a funny movie, cause it's Sean Connery with a handlebar mustache and a wedding dress. Right? But like, it's making a point here.

RIght, the thing is, the effect of it is that Sean Connery is there in a wedding dress, they sneak Sean Connery to Friend by disguising him as a bride, and they go like, Friend, kiss the bride, and take it off, and it's Sean Connery with the big mustache. Friend kind of sardonically calls him a naughty girl, by the way. And Friend goes, death comes closer for us all!' And I wrote, "'This is really quite something.'" ALICE Death is a bride, you know? Not an uncommon sort of metaphor.

So yeah. RILEY Well, it is worth noting that these guys, their entire thing is they want to die, so all of their battle cries are just like, "'It's time to die, boys!' But they're talking about themselves and it's very, it's just fun and interesting. ALICE Yeah, it's really good. Also I'm not sure why I wrote this down, but I do have a note here that says joining the Vortex to change it from the inside.

KATE He does do that. Oh no, it's because Mei says, why not join us? That's why. Mei says, don't destroy us. Friend is like, because they go and meet Mei, and friend is like, we gotta tear this whole thing down. And Mei's like, no, don't tear it down. No.

Join us, like, fuck me and all of my girls. Oh, I have the fucking dro- listen, right, transtwitter.wav. I have my followers. Inseminate us all. So yeah, she's like, if you... "-Listen, I'll get to you." If you fuck me and all my followers, right, if you get us all pregnant, right, this is maybe the greatest deal in the history of deals, right?

"-Fuck all of our beautiful women and then we'll let you go." Yeah, no no no, not we'll let you go, in exchange we will provide you with all human knowledge. "-Oh, wow, okay, well, what's the fucking- This is my note when he's with the apathetics, is, Mr. Zed, sir, please come in all our pussies, and then later on when we're with me, it's like, alright, here's my final offer. Come in all our pussies. ALICE In exchange, all human knowledge. ZED We'll give you all human knowledge if you do

this. And he's like, huh. ALICE Which he does! He fucks her, right, and we get a kind of trippy, like, projection orgy scene, where all human knowledge is explained to him. Now granted, all human knowledge is also pretty Eurocentric, but I will note that he does understand Marxism here. Yes, they do include Marxism.

They explain dialectics, and he achieves the fantasy of every university student on a politics course which is to perfectly understand Marxism without having read anything because you fucked the right girl. That's what happened to me. What's going on with me right now? That's what happened to all of us. So with this knowledge, right? This scene has a lot of stuff being projected onto hot naked bodies. Yeah, it does. So that's what happened to all of us. So with this knowledge, right?

This scene has a lot of stuff being projected onto hot naked bodies. Yeah, it does. Yeah, it's cool. It's like, at this point, I'm completely inured to seeing the form at this point. They're having to go harder in order to actually get any sort of rise out of me. Yeah. Then we get this incredible exchange where Friend, this is just like casually dropped, they found out, oh yeah, by the way, the Vortex is a spaceship, it was designed to go to the

stars, and Sean Conner was like, did you go? And Friend is like, yeah, there's nothing there. Yeah, we tried that, it's shit. They sealed themselves away. This is, it like anticipates the end of history stuff. It's so good. To be like, yeah, we completed civilization, we filled out the last little bit of the tech tree which is go to space, there is nothing in space.

There's nothing in space! There's no new culture being produced, there's no new anything, there is just this sort of like, absence of any new thing to be invented. All of everything is on Earth. The Vortex was supposed to be a kind of scientific commune where we study everything forever and then we'd be kind of like super knowledgeable. And then we did, but there's nothing worth knowing

because without living a fucking human life, knowledge isn't worth anything. And in fact, a friend even has the line, knowledge is not enough. It's so good. It's so fucking good. ALICE Something to think about whenever anyone tries to tell you that AI will allow you to lead a sort of like, laborless, frictionless life.

Anyway, so Zed goes back to the statue graveyard thing, where there's a bunch of mannequins with old military uniforms, which is nice, and he gets jumpscared by a newly regrown Zados. ALICE Arthur Frayne, baby. ALICE Arthur Frayne, who's like, I fucking knew it, you're my boy, you did the thing I was trying to get you to do all along, I'm so proud of you, here is a MacGuffin, here is a little diamond. RILEY He's a diamond, pal.

ALICE Yeah. RILEY And he goes, oh, okay. ALICE Not enough people give me diamonds, I'm thinking. RILEY So at this point, the Eternals, led by Consuelo, are breaking in, they're ready to kill, she comes in, and Sean Connery, having now gained all the knowledge in the world, psychically immobilizes her. Yeah. And he quotes Nietzsche at her, and he's like-

I'm just gonna say, comes once starts quoting Nietzsche. Yeah, and he quotes Nietzsche at her, and like, Professor X's her, and he's like, you've become a brutal, you've become the very thing that you swore to destroy. And she's like- Perfect seduction, he has perfectly lowered her to his level. She does like, the hardest heel phase turn ever, she's like, you're right, I love you, here's a ring, and by the way, I will lead the mob away and give you cover. Yes, perfect.

Great, cool, fantastic. Yeah, sick. At this point, the true villain of the film is revealed. Yes, this is the tabernacle. The computer voice that we've been hearing all this time. I love this movie. This is the, like, sort of AI or whatever. It's like some bullshit about crystals, but it's not important, right?

You'd Kovsky should watch this movie, though. It's like Superman in that, like, the technology is crystals. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter. The point is, it's the technological being, or awareness, or whatever, that networks all of their thoughts together, and also prevents them from dying, and rebirths them, and ages them, and so on. It's the big AI that runs everything.

Yeah. So he gets sucked into the big AI that runs everything. ALICE Yeah. So he gets sucked into the diamond, which prompts the... DEMONIC VOICE You have penetrated me. ALICE...from the tabernacle. LWX Well, it asks him, like, why not stay here, don't destroy me, stay here, become one of us, and he's like, no, you have to fucking die. So then he gets, like, sucked into the crystal... ALICE Places against life, he says.

LWX Yeah, really fucking good. He gets sucked into, like, a crystal maze at the heart of the word tabernacle. Sean Connery runs around this maze yelling the word tabernacle a lot for slightly too long. It's trippy, it's kind of... You could have cut some of it, nearly. Cut like 20 seconds of it. The way he destroys it is he shoots his own reflection, which causes the mirror to bleed

in a very nice, like fun effect. And, y'know. Specifically he shoots a vision of himself as an exterminator, because he's wearing slightly more clothes at this point. Yes, I will say that is my one complaint, is that when he gains all the knowledge of the universe he does cover those titties up. He does. And I'm disappointed by that.

But he shoots a vision of himself as an exterminator, and like, overcomes his own nature, I suppose, in some way? ALICE Yeah, he fulfills Zardo's plan for him, which is to become, as Zardo says, the slave who could free his masters, which is a fucking Hegelian dialectic is happening in this movie. Again, you can't just be like, oh, it's the one where Sean Connery wears a mankini and gets his tits out. No. RILEY Yeah, showing you the weird visuals from

this, going, wuh wuh wuh wuh! ALICE WUH? No, no, no, it's more than that-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha And, yeah, so this destroys... Sean Connery also gains the power to reverse time. Mm, yeah. He destroys the barrier between the Vortex and the Outlands, so of course his fellow exterminators storm in and fucking exterminate people who are yearning for death. They want to die, yeah. Yeah, it's great. It's like how you'd end a movie with a shootout in the era want to die, yeah. Yeah, it's great.

It's like how you'd end a movie with a shootout in the era, but instead of a shootout, it's like a mercy killing, right? Because all of the guys there are like, we can die finally! And then they're just like, let's do it! Bring it on, baby! And you can see that the exterminators, who are busy exterminating, are fucking baffled. They're like, where is our boy, why are all these women with their tits out telling me to kill them?

ALICE I will, but, uh... ALICE Yeah, exactly. ZARDA Yeah, the founder of their society says, we challenge the natural order, the vortex is an offence against nature, and he dies, and that's how they find out they're mortal now. The big Xardas head falls out of the sky, Connery sends Mei and all of her followers who are now pregnant out of the sky. Connery sends May and all of her followers who are now pregnant out into the world.

Yep, repopulate the earth. And then he, he leaves in the opposite direction with Charlotte Ramplin. So first a couple of things happen. Arthur says, I engineered all this. I wanted to bring an end to the society. This is all my master plan. And I even bred you to do it. And Zed has this interesting line where he says, I like, I have gazed into the one who bred you. So he maybe implies that the tabernacle itself engineered this or that this was somehow inevitable, which again, hegelius.

And I will say this Arthur has fantastic positive mental attitude about that because he just looks at a friend that goes, damn, I got used to and friend goes, we all did. And they just shrug and keep walking. ALICE That's a bit I really like, that feels Shakespearean too to me. That kind of like, all's well that ends well kind of fast, you know? It'd be like, well, you know, we poor players, ehhh, you know. RILEY It's the perfect halfway, because they all

die and they all get married, so it's exactly halfway. ALICE Yeah! Absolutely. RILEY Holy shit, you're right! ALICE Yeah, it's's exactly half of it. Yeah! Absolutely. You're right! Yeah. It's someone, someone also really liked Shakespeare. Mm. We get a montage of Zed and Consuela, they live inside the giant head, they kiss, she

gets pregnant, they have a son- This is un-fucking-believeable. They age. The son gets old and leaves, and then they age and become hilarious skeletons. The gun is like rusting on the wall behind him the whole time. So I've mentioned the motherhood statement before, right? This is that, right?

Literally, in the most literal sense of, you know, new birth and motherhood is the thing that will restore normalcy and save the world, and sort of take us back from this thing that got too speculative and we got too scared of, right? And the thing is, when I mentioned that before, I use it as a criticism of science fiction, speculative fiction as a genre, right? But like, it can be a little bit limiting, but it's still interesting, right? It's still, like, it doesn't preclude it being interesting art, great art, whatever, and I think this is the motherhood statement, like, as a convention of the form, done very well.

Right? Yes. To be like, oh, they fuckin' made it too weird with technology and now we had to get it back to normal, is still, like, in this film, it's done with a degree of invention that I think is... y'know, it's so weird and alienating, deliberately, in the service of making these points that I don't resent it. RIght? Yeah. I dunno, I'm thinking about the whole ending sequence, and I really wanna just, like, because the whole way through this sequence, everything I'm saying, they're gonna be blasting Beethoven

7th over the top of it, like, they get as much out of this as you can physically get out of it the immortals are getting massacred they want to get killed yeah they do you are you've got your fucking uh exterminators are coming in they're shooting everyone they're confused about it they're yelling out for z and they're like z where are you z where are you and it cuts in on all of the faces of the like people that we've been with this whole time who are now dead it's soft focused they're all lying in like flower beds. Hard cuts across to Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling. Charlotte Rampling is pregnant. She's giving birth. And then the final sequence is Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling sat there like staged just straight in front of you and they age and it like they have certain age front of you and they age and

it like they have certain age and it cuts and they're like a little bit older and they've got the baby between them and he ages up and then he leaves and the two of them age into skeletons and this whole time beat over seventh is pumping. And even if you go into this going like, this is a funny movie, lol, nostalgia critic, who, who, who, who, you're still going gonna end this going, I've just, like, seen something. Like, someone's put an immense amount of genuine effort into creating a feeling here at the end.

And it's fantastic. It's beautiful. It's good. Can we talk about the director's cut? Yes, please. Because I haven't heard this, right, but I've heard tell of it. And the thing about the director's cut, it really makes me quite sad to hear about, which is that, as I understand it, John Borman, the director, is quite sort of like...

I don't know, he's sort of like quite dismissive, quite sort of like self-deprecating about this film. ALICE Embarrassed, perhaps? ALICE Yeah, he kind of jokes about like, oh, we were doing a lot of drugs when we made this, you can fast forward through this scene if you want, and it's like, well hold on, I think you're being too unkind to yourself, right? Because this is a movie that like, okay, it's not Citizen Kane, right? It's maybe not even a great movie exactly, but I think it's a good movie, and I think

most of all it's an inventive movie. That is trying to sort of like, explore some themes interestingly, and I think it's trying to do that in a way that is basically impossible in a movie that got its distribution this wide at the time, now. And yeah, I'm sort of like, I'm very glad I saw it, I enjoyed it a lot. RETTA Yeah, me too. They made a work of art. And like, doing that, it doesn't always come out perfect, and sometimes it comes out weird

and unfocused, but you know. ALICE A little bit silly sometimes, but yeah, sure. RETTA Better than just the product. ALICE Mmhm, absolutely. No, it's like, it's a very sincere film, and I think a lot of the sort of criticism of it tends to treat it as something that's trivial, something that's insincere, and I think a lot of the criticism of it tends to treat it as something that's trivial, something that's insincere, and it isn't. No.

And also I think a lot of the criticism of it is by people who don't want to try and engage sincerely with the work of art. Yeah. They want to remember it so you don't have to. I'm too cool to be moved, I'm too cool to be impressed, or to try and approach it as if it's trying to tell me something or make me feel something, I'm so cynical and clever and cool and it's like, I think you actually cut yourself off by doing that. Like, this is a work of art, engage with it on that level.

It's got really, really interesting things to say about violence, about masculinity, about death. It is very like a play, in that things can be other things and a lot of the effects are done just with actors committing to something, and a body, and yeah, sometimes you have to be like, okay, this is what they're trying to symbolise, and you have to actively go with it, it doesn't just spoonfeed you. ALICE And I joked a little bit about the vortex being the AFAB house share earlier, and I think there is space for an interesting and not so sarcastic exploration of like, gender and gendering in this movie.

Yeah. Because, you know, Zed is kind of like, exaggeratedly masculine. I mean, great casting to get Sean Connery. Yeah, truly. You know, and the ways in which the Vortex is kind of like, feminized or de-gendered, and the sort of difference between those two things. I mean, consider also the last time we saw Sean Connery as an actor perform a scene in which he tried to rape a woman on a haystack, was Goldfinger.

It's kind of interesting that, or probably he didn't mean to do this, or like, they probably didn't do this consciously, but it's very interesting that we have that scene where he goes to rape that woman on the haystack and isn't into it because she's not fighting back. ALICE The thing about rape in this movie specifically, is I think it makes some interesting points. I mentioned a bit about the people of the vortex who are completely, you know, this is something foreign to them and something exotic and something arousing and titillating

and entertaining, is something that really interests me. On the other hand, I do think that's kind of its weakest point thematically, besides aging, y'know? I think it's one of those things where... it's trying very hard to explore some ideas in an experimental, progressive way, right? And I think that aging and sexual assault are the two things where they kind of, like, it snaps back to the 70s a little bit, y'know? And I think the kind of feminism which this film is kind of steeped in, or aware of, is very much of the 70s too. I think it has an attempt to explore gender dynamics that is ultimately... it transcends

successfully but is still, like, originating from second wave feminism of the 70s, and this idea that, like, men are inherently, like, intrinsically more violent and so on. ALICE I would be really, really interested to see a modern remake of this. Done seriously. I would really, really like to see that. By a woman. Yes, definitely. By a trans woman.

By us. Yeah, alright, in the course of doing this movie we've gone from encouraging them to watch Zardo's with their friends, to trying to organize watching Zardoz with them, to trying to organize remaking Zardoz, which is kind of the best testament of the effect this film has on you. Yeah. Especially talking about it. Yeah. It's-

John Bullman, come on the show and let us make Zardoz. Zardoz 2, Zardoz-er. I just wanna say, John Bullman, first of all, great work, phenomenal stuff. Set decoration by John Hosely, unbelievable job. Costume design by Crystal Cruz Borman, who I believe was Josh's, sorry, not Josh, Josh Borman is our friend. John Borman, who made the movie Zardozza. His wife.

Yeah, no. They did this for like, for no money. No money! Like, major parts of this are just like him and his wife, just doing things. And you don't really get guys to like, make movies based on like, I dunno, fuckin' smoky a bunch of weed and breathing in hard-remembering hagel and T.S. Elliot, y'know? Can you imagine Daniel Craig doing Xardos, now?

I- I badly want to see it. I would love to see that, actually. I think I can, yeah. You'd be good at it. Mm. But I mean, like, can you imagine him doing a movie with like less than a million dollar budget that's just like, you know, it's just weird and just in a field in his pants, like, yeah!

Be fuckin' sick! It's just, it's interesting the way the industry was different. Mm. This movie made me like Sean Connery more. Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Be fucking sick. It's just, it's interesting the way the industry was different. This movie made me like Sean Connery more. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it's like when we watched Copland. I know you were there, when I was in Copland, we were like, oh, this guy can act. Yeah, I watched the film. I couldn't join the recording in the end, but I did really like it.

Yeah, like it's one of those things you're like, oh, you can act motherfucker. So I like feel a little bit like not more sympathetic., I'm more upset that there isn't more to talk about in the box. Genuinely, genuinely, this makes me rate the bonds worse, that this is the stuff that they were squandering, right? Yeah. Do you remember when we did Shoot'em Up? And we were like, okay, that was a bad film and it was morally bad, but we respect the

director. This is like the morally good version of that, it was like, okay, this is a weird film, but I respect the hell out of everyone who made it. ALICE Yeah, genuinely. The thing is, it's kind of the context in which this film was made doesn't really exist anymore. Like, these hippies are kind of gone, y'know? And as a time capsule, as a work of art from 70s kind of hippie or hippie adjacent art

people, this is really really interesting to interrogate, and it makes me wanna sort of like, yeah, let us do the remake. Yeah, let's do the remake. Alright. Well, this is- Great do the remake. Yeah, let's do the remake. Alright. Well, this is Zado's, I mean, yeah, fantastic. I knew we would do this eventually, but I had no preconceptions about it, and I'm so so glad that we did it. I picked this because the Hogs voted it on the...

They wanted it so badly and it ended up going up against Cars 2 in the rematch, and it went out very very early, and I decided out of respect to put it on there. I did not even think it was gonna be this good, I thought it'd be like, you know, nostalgia critic haha. Yeah, same. But this rocks! I had such a genuinely good time watching this movie. Yeah. And you can kind of have it both ways, because I also have the button that is just the nostalgia

critic drops. I'm gonna try and limit my use of that, but you know it's gonna be difficult going forward. No, I wanted it not. Yeah, yeah. Wait, do you want me to limit it, or do you want me to not limit it? We should have had access to that when we did the Sean Connery bombs. That's our review of Goldfiginger, it's just kill yourself. Yeah, yeah. I mean, don't even ask me about the one I got from that clip of

fucking Steve Harvey from Family Feud. KILLIN' MYSELF! Just a little drop roundup. So look out for those. KJV 2024, let's go. That's right, that's right, ten thousand years of KJV. Whose pick is it next, for the bonus? Uh, god, I think it might be mine.

I dunno. We'll find out. Yeah, it is mine, because I sort of, we figured out that it was your turn, Dev, so it's mine again. In which case, let me think about it. Yes, that was my turn, actually. It might not be some 60s Italian bullshit. Famous last words.

In the meantime- I believe your last one was The Conformist, before that was... Yeah, was The Consequences of Love, I, um... Thing is, they were good movies. Alright. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening, thank you so much for subscribing to the Patreon, we will be back. The one that comes out after this on the main feed is gonna be Red Dragon, right? Yeah. Not that one.

Not that one. Not that one. Yeah, no. Not the Hannibal one, the 1965 German-Austrian-Italian co-production, Red Dragon. Oh baby. West German, I would say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanna see an East German spy movie. Yeah, and on that episode we've got Alex Patak from the podcasts.

Fantastic. We will see you next time. Thanks so much for coming. Get yourself. Enus! Fantastic. We will see you next time. Thanks so much for coming. Get yourself. ENUS. Thank you for listening to yet another episode of Kill James Bond. Next week on The Free Feed it's Red Dragon. Not that one. Worse than you could possibly imagine. But, we got Alex Patak,

though it's a fun little chap, even if the movie is not that good. And the next bonus episode is, we've given Alice the Reins back against you, better believe it is the French new wave drama film, Vive sa vie? I know it's not Game and Heart, I just say it every time because it's funny to me. Jonathan Gurday, I know that's wrong but I just say it wrong every time because I panic and I have never asked. Mothman, Beefcrime, Kit Divine, Jack Drummond, Tarpo, Steve Winishans, Anne Hedonia, Maeve, Victoria Roth-Rosie, Can't Fail, Help, Senn Horses and Men, Claire, Forest L. Novell, Sean Connery, Anne, The Leather Budgie, Smuggler Blues Band, Lenina, Project Project, Emerus, Commissar Ozymandias, Whitney, Wolverine, a trans robot,

just the worst, hell, Joyce Wu, Kil James Bond highlights, Zan Hutch, an Artemis, Violet Cyber, Isopod Gal, Annie Ruby, Katie, Brobes, Bronin, Clarification, Virat Sikkar, John2089, Noblesse Oblihy, Connor's Cool Big Sister, Sergeant Jackrum,

Seng Shen, Alex, Liz and Ash in Florida, Corvid Cultist, Woolscott, Quinn Valeri, Grendel Graus, Wolfie, Al Irwing, Philippa Smith, banned from being funny in the jazz outro, apparently. Bin Ross, Robert Greensmith, Abigail, Electrover Cyberpuppi, Loz Pycock, Mega Combi, Emily, Queen of Sloths, Tersey, Shindyle, Josh, Simmonds, Zoe, Shepard, Cheer Up Love, Might Never Happen, Vae, Talkative

Tiger and Lauren Bastin. Thank you. Killjames1 is Alice, Abigail and Devin, producers are the wonderful Nate Bethay and Sterling Mr. Thomas O'Mahoney. Our podcast art is by Mattie Lepchanski. Our website is by Tom Allen. And I'll see you next time. Mwah.