Nice Duds

Dunno, maybe I'm really losing it but I'm beginning to think Zardoz is actually quite a good scifi film. Sure I've seen it a fair few times so I've become inured to it's intense silliness but beyond the paper bag scene, the dodgy pants, stupefying chanting and po faced seriousness this much maligned lump still has a shiny nugget of decent ideas. Sean plays a savage who sneaks into a decadent, decaying society of Elites whose tinkering and technology are about to collapse under the brutal clunking fist of Connery's innate masculinty, hey stop sniggering at the back, along the way there's plenty of cheesey dialogue, ham acting and cod philosophy but it somehow works. This time around it made me think of Clarke's City and the Stars, in reverse, kind of, anyways regardless of it's faults this is a distinctive, dystopian flick that has few peers in terms of er commitment. Think Barbarella with chest hair and a bit more brains.


Alien 3, though not as ridiculed as Zardoz, is still widely regarded as pile of shit but rewatching it on Bluray has somehow tempered my earlier disdain. Directed by David Fincher it's festooned with half-decent British actors and there's plenty of grubby, industrial scifi stylings and the requisite action and gore. The main failing of this 3rd outing of Ripley and her xenomorphs however lies within the plot: napping in deep space Ripley and the remaining survivors from Aliens are ejected onto a prison planet when things go tits up on the spaceship, only Ripley survives and ends up hooking up with the prison Doc played by Charles Dance and unsettling the warden as well as the assorted murderers and rapists all the while slowly being thinned out by the now familiar foe. Ripley's actions and behaviour seem a little incongruous to her previous antics but there's some good banter provided by the inmates and Weaver's performance is strong as ever and she's complimented with an excellent actor playing Dillon the righteous Pastor to the damned. Seriously it's not that bad and in comparison to most contemporary efforts it's got plenty to offer.