ZPG (DVD)

While I certainly do applaud Legend Films for putting several old nuggets out on DVD for the first time (this, The Skull, The Possession of Joel Delaney, and Student Bodies, are all finally on disc!), ZPG really isn't worth revisiting unless you're just dying to see Oliver Reed in a unitard.

There are much better 70s big brother alarmist flicks around — Soylent Green, Logan's Run, and Silent Running spring to mind — and if you'd like something a little more modern (and a lot more exciting) along these lines, check out 2006's Children of Men.

But I digress. ZPG on its own merits, without the alongsides, is still a super-talky snoozefest. In it, futuristic players Russ and Carol McNeil (Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin) work as recreation actors in a museum of history. They, along with another faux couple, live in a display house where they "live" as people once did: eating real food, sleeping in beds, doing housework, making love, reading, watching television — all for the edification of a zombielike populace who currently survive on a paste-like protein substance, work as drones for big business, and are forbidden to reproduce.

Those who do screw and spawn are put into a suffocation dome where they die, seriously regretting their crime against humanity. So when the museum couples decide to let their educational sexual activity lead to real-life pregnancy, they must escape their display cases and go on the run. It certainly sounds like it could be suspenseful and exciting, or at least cheesy fun, but ZPG is so listless and dour, there's no way to connect. Not only does it exceed exposition overload, the planning isn't even punctuated by action of any kind — it's mostly just talking heads (and the occasional full-length unitard view).

There are some promising, creepy moments early on: particularly scenes involving the adoption of childlike robot-dolls (certainly foreshadowing 2001's Artificial Intelligence: AI). But as far as self-important dystopian horror/sci-fi thrillers go, ZPG probably should have taken its own cue and not been put into the cinematic gene pool.

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