This was a really horrible science fiction movie from 1974, and I don’t want any of my readers to make the mistake of actually watching it, which is a mistake that I sadly made.
However, I did make some interesting observations about how body types have changed since 1974. The movie stars a shirtless hairy-chested 43-year-old Sean Connery. Today, you never see men with hairy chests unless they are someone who is being mocked, but Sean Connery had a hairy chest and he was a sex symbol back in the day. Secondly, Sean Connery was skinny compared to male actors today. He was in decent shape, but he didn’t have huge biceps or ripped abs. Male actors today either lift more weights, or take steroids. All the other men in the movie were skinny ectomorphs, although they were supposed to be "eternals" who considered themselves more evolved than humans. I don't even know if a casting director today could find so many skinny ectomorphic actors. Obviously the movie was wrong in its prediction that, in the future, men would get skinnier.
The movie also feature a lot of gratuitous bare breasts. And I couldn’t help but notice that the breasts were a lot smaller in 1974. Today, a large percentage of bare breasts that you see in movies are augmented by plastic surgery. In 1974, the breasts were natural.
* * *
If the movie had any insight into the future, it was in predicting memes that are now prevalent in "manosphere" blogs. The female eternals are feminazis, and the men are so beta that they can't even get an erection. Then hairy-chested shirtless alpha-male Sean Connery comes along, and the eternal women secretly, or maybe not so secretly, want him to rape them.
In before a bunch of commenters quoting "THE GUN IS GOOD THE PENIS IS EVIL".
As for the breasts - I don't know. How often do you see a movie with so much gratuitous nudity that isn't porn?
[HS: Wow, a reader has already seen this turkey of a movie?]
Posted by: IHTG | February 19, 2012 at 07:52 PM
In Zardoz's supposed future, the human race has split into strictly segregated castes, analogous to the dystopian far future depicted H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine."
Per Zardoz's Wikipedia entry:
In the year AD 2293, a post-apocalyptic Earth is inhabited mostly by the Brutals, who are ruled by the Eternals. Eternals use other Brutals, called Exterminators, as the Chosen warrior class. The Exterminators worship the god Zardoz, a huge, flying, hollow stone head. Zardoz teaches:
"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. Go forth...and kill!"
Thus, the Exterminator raiders who periodically kill (cull) the domesticated Brutal slaves are a crude form of population control, a way of maintaining ecological and social balance in the Eternals' ostensibly perfect order.
The Eternals do consider themselves more evolved than the Brutals. The Eternals are intellectually superior but they are physically feeble. The Brutals are just the opposite. They have just enough intelligence to use weapons and mill grain. However, the Brutals are physically much fitter and stronger than the unathletic Eternals.
It's not surprising the Eternals were all cast as ectomorphs, this was intentional.
Posted by: Psychotronic Film Guide | February 19, 2012 at 09:28 PM
HS, oh so YOU'RE the one who induced me to order the movie. LOL. Actually I thought it was fascinating, but I don't watch stuff like that normally.
Posted by: jeanne | February 19, 2012 at 09:28 PM
i saw this movie at the TLA repertoire theater in Philadelphia when i was 16 years old (granted, that was 1986 and people weren't as boring and uptight then as they are now), it remains one of my favorite movies of all time--how can anyone who follows game gender roles and the folly of intellectuals taken to the nth degree not love this movie?
Posted by: dana | February 19, 2012 at 09:29 PM
"Today, you never see men with hairy chests unless they are someone who is being mocked"
There's been another change too :((((
Posted by: Peter | February 19, 2012 at 10:12 PM
I've seen it. It's a cheesy, third rate move. But I thought it was interesting. If I remember correctly, Connery's character "Zed" has his mind probed and turns out to have a higher IQ than the more evolved Eternals.
Posted by: destructure | February 19, 2012 at 10:28 PM
Only with the sexual revolution did muscularity and large breasts come into high demand. Men and women alike are less hairy now too. The changes in male and female physiques shows how one generation of sexual selection shaped culture and mating.
Posted by: Conquistador | February 19, 2012 at 11:04 PM
Sean Connery is a classic alpha male.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FgMLROTqJ0
Posted by: Conquistador | February 19, 2012 at 11:07 PM
"If the movie had any insight into the future, it was in predicting memes that are now prevalent in "manosphere" blogs. The female eternals are feminazis, and the men are so beta that they can't even get an erection. Then hairy-chested shirtless alpha-male Sean Connery comes along, and the eternal women secretly, or maybe not so secretly, want him to rape them."
In other words the USA is now a matriarchy. We have reverted back to the state of nature. The ghetto, the barrio, and trailer park, is the natural consequence. Feminism was wonderful.
Posted by: Conquistador | February 19, 2012 at 11:15 PM
It was much better than it's remake , the Book of Eli.
Posted by: bluto | February 19, 2012 at 11:16 PM
"Men and women alike are less hairy now too"
In fact, according to my careful research, at least 75% of adult women are completely hairless. Many of the remainder have just landing strips. About the only women who still sometimes remain in their natural states are Asian women, lesbians, and hippie chicks, and even many of them are starting to change. It's very, very disturbing :(
Posted by: Peter | February 19, 2012 at 11:34 PM
"Secondly, Sean Connery was skinny compared to male actors today. He was in decent shape, but he didn’t have huge biceps or ripped abs."
He was a competitive bodybuilder in the early 1950's.
Posted by: Peter | February 19, 2012 at 11:36 PM
@Peter
What the hell, I guess the ubiquity of those bulking solutions has made bodybuilding into a whole other thing..
Posted by: Kaz | February 19, 2012 at 11:56 PM
"Male actors today either lift more weights, or take steroids."
Haven't you ever seen any of the sword-and-sandal movies of the 1950s and 1960s? They had no problem finding mighty musclemen like Steve Reeves to play the main characters.
Posted by: JP | February 19, 2012 at 11:58 PM
OT. have you seen these twitter comments by a Korean singer?
http://www.expathell.com/?p=3932
Posted by: Kiwiguy | February 20, 2012 at 02:07 AM
It's also worth noting that the "beta" Eternals are those tasked with preserving mankind's knowledge.
Posted by: IHTG | February 20, 2012 at 05:43 AM
"What the hell, I guess the ubiquity of those bulking solutions has made bodybuilding into a whole other thing.."
Even the top bodybuilders of the pre-'roids/HGH era were positively bony by today's bodybuilding standards.
Sean Connery's ample chest hair was a minor plot point in his Bond movie You Only Live Twice. He was being made up to look Japanese, in order to infiltrate the villain's lair, and at the last moment someone noticed that his hairy chest would be a dead giveaway that he was an imposter.
Posted by: Peter | February 20, 2012 at 10:25 AM
The elite bodybuilders from the 50s are much much smaller than the elite guys today. They don't even look like the same species. The guys today take every performance enhancing drug under the sun and are just plain freakish. I was reading something recently about $60000 plus a year. It is really like a whole different sport compared to natural athletes. There is no possible way to eat and train enough to be built like those guys.
Posted by: M | February 20, 2012 at 10:31 AM
There were plenty of muscle man actors, but bulky actors in general were not favored for major speaking parts. The average 5'8" guy also didn't go out of his way to bulk up from pure vanity. That's more common today.
The biggest guy (and he was pretty big) you saw in conventional speaking parts was...
http://www.tvparty.com/bgifs18/rifleman-header.jpg
Posted by: Duncan Idaho | February 20, 2012 at 11:09 AM
"It is really like a whole different sport compared to natural athletes."
Not just bodybuilding, but lots of other sports. For example, compare the puffy white guys from 1960s football compared to the hypertrophied monsters of today's NFL.
Posted by: JP | February 20, 2012 at 11:40 AM
You just figuring this out! Go to the beach and compare actual men to men in ads. I suspect young women today don't even know that men have hair on their chest, backs etc because in print and video, you never see it.
Posted by: Jason | February 20, 2012 at 12:03 PM
Even in the early 60s, guys were using steroids. norethandrolone (nilevar) was the first oral anabolic, released in 1956, followed by methandrostenolone (dianabol) in 1958. The Americans were building on the work of the Soviets, who experimented with testosterone injections for their athletes in the early 50s, shattering records and racking up medals in weightlifting. The oral anabolics were embraced by the California bodybuilding community, and from there, their use spread.
Bodybuilders started using HGH back in the mid 70s; it was sucked out of cadavers. This really allowed them to put on the muscles.
Posted by: Matt in RTP | February 20, 2012 at 12:52 PM
Keep in mind that most stories that take place in the future are idealized versions of it. Does anyone seriously believe that the Star Trek version of the future is going to win out over the Idiocracy version? Neither do I.
Posted by: Jay M | February 20, 2012 at 01:27 PM
Actually bust size and hip size have decreased over the past few decades. It's been proven scientifically. Playboy models have become more androgynous.
http://www.maryannefisher.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/BMJ_2002_Voracek_Fisher.pdf
Posted by: FirstComment | February 20, 2012 at 02:31 PM
In Britain, probably well into the 1980s, going to a gymnasium and doing weight-lifting type exercises just wasn't something people did. Not even professional soccer players trained that way.
Posted by: AnomalyUK | February 20, 2012 at 04:27 PM
"I suspect young women today don't even know that men have hair on their chest, backs etc because in print and video, you never see it"
And I suspect that young men today don't even know that women are supposed to have hair ... oh, to hell with it.
Posted by: Peter | February 20, 2012 at 05:15 PM
Same thing with Major League Baseball players from the '70s; they all seem skinny compared to today's players.
Posted by: E. Rekshun | February 20, 2012 at 06:12 PM
Zardoz is a great flick; you really need to see it a few times to appreciate it.
The actresses in this are not classically busty. But there were plenty of large chested women in movies back then--check out a Russ Meyer flick or something like that.
Also, "it puts hair on your chest" used to be a positive reinforcement.
Posted by: chucho | February 20, 2012 at 07:12 PM
A good catch you made that the body types we see on TV and movies now are not the body types we saw 60 years ago.
But Family Guy got there first.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brSqr9XJNQc
Oh, and I'll watch a crap movie but I don't think I could sit through this.
Posted by: lil mike | February 20, 2012 at 08:09 PM
"Keep in mind that most stories that take place in the future are idealized versions of it."
Yeah, that's why there's a whole genre devoted to "futures that suck" with countless novels, movies, etc...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_films
(nb Zardoz is one)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_music,_TV_programs,_and_games
Posted by: JP | February 20, 2012 at 08:22 PM
Hell Mark McGuire and Barry Bonds seemed skinny in their first five seasons or so.
Posted by: Duncan | February 20, 2012 at 09:20 PM
Also, check out any music video from the 80s. The guys were all skinny. Heck, you could even be gay and cool in the 80s. People are more approving of gay rights today, but that's not what people want in their music and movie stars now. The trend today is for hairless musclemen.
Anyone can be skinny, as long as you don't eat much, but only some people can get big muscles.
Posted by: John | February 20, 2012 at 09:21 PM
Sean Connery is 81 years old. Wow!
Posted by: E. Rekshun | February 21, 2012 at 12:05 PM
I once broke up with an attractive, leggy woman because she was too hairy "down there."
[HS: The anti-Peter?]
Posted by: E. Rekshun | February 21, 2012 at 12:06 PM
Until about 20 years ago, movie leading men reeked of masculinity... Gable, Bogart, Wayne, Grant, Connery, Eastwood. Now they're kind of asexual like Pitt, Cruise and Affleck. Apparently women audiences prefer sexually non-threatening over all other manly traits.
Posted by: RandyB | February 21, 2012 at 12:49 PM
Zardoz has boobies? This was news to me. I caught it on TV one morning 20 years ago, while home sick. The movie didn't make much sense to me but now I see that it could've been because they cut all the scenes with the breasts.
Posted by: Propeller Island | February 21, 2012 at 01:23 PM
"I once broke up with an attractive, leggy woman because she was too hairy "down there.""
This is one of the most depressing things I've ever read :)
Posted by: Peter | February 21, 2012 at 01:52 PM
Men used to look so much better years ago than they do now.
Men should be skinny and hairy.
Today, they look like plastic buffoons. Giant hairless chests.
It's very anti-erotic.
Posted by: as | February 21, 2012 at 11:23 PM