FilmBar70 Sci-Fi Double-Bill:
The Final Programme (Fuest, 1973) & Zardoz (Boorman, 1974): Roxy Bar & Screen, 7pm
This is part of the Scala Forever season, a programme of 111 films at 26 venues through to October 2 that will celebrate the wonderful Scala cinema at King's Cross which closed in 1993. Here is an article I wrote in the Guardian on the history of the cinema and the season and here are the details of all the movies and special events on offer, via the Scala Forever website.
Time Out review of The Final programme:
'Read Michael Moorcock's novel first and you might make sense of this garbled sci-fi fantasy about scientists trying to breed a self-reproducing hermaphrodite as the end of the world approaches. Concentrating as always on giving his work a chic gloss, Fuest (acting as his own set designer) simply lets things drift from muddle to muddle while a few moments of black comedy surface.' Tom Milne
Here is the trailer.
Time Out review of Zardoz:
'A bizarre futurist fantasy which seems to have substituted itself when Boorman's plans to film Tolkien's Lord of the Rings fell through. Zardoz (joke ref: Wizard of Oz) is a vast, Blakean bust of a bearded Zeus which roams the air spewing arms and ammunition to its Exterminators on earth so that they may enforce the law: 'The gun is good, the penis is evil'. Liberated by the memory of a rape committed in the course of his liberties, one of these Exterminators (Connery) enters the godhead, kills the magician manipulating it, and finds he has penetrated the Vortex, a world of sterilised stasis established to preserve the sum of man's knowledge. At which point, poised to take off from its make love not war springboard, perhaps to explore the dichotomy between physical and spiritual forces, the script gradually falls apart into a mess of philosophical pottage under the whimsically pretentious Tolkien influence. But visually the film remains a sparkling display of fireworks, brilliantly shot and directed.'
Tom Milne
Here is the trailer.
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