Z.P.G. (Zero Population Growth)

Directed by Michael Campus
Cast: Oliver Reed, Geraldine Chaplin, Don Gordon, Diane Cilento
United Kingdom, 1972, 105 minutes

Sunday, August 12 - 12:30pm at Roxie Film Center

Thursday, August 16 - 5:15pm at Roxie Film Center

Z.P.G. (Zero Population Growth) is one of those great old-fashioned dystopian science-fiction head-trips that used to fuel the pre-Star Wars popular imagination. There was a time when popular culture thought that downbeat was okay and the good guys didn't always have to win. Movies like Rollerball, Soylent Green, Future Shock, Fahrenheit 451, The Man who Fell to Earth, Wild in the Streets, Zardoz, Logan's Run, No Blade of Grass, The Omega Man, Silent Running and the entire Planet of the Apes series were the norm, not the exception. However, Z.P.G. was quite obscure even when it was released; it played regional television stations late at night for a couple of years, and basically disappeared for the last 30 years. Alfonso Cuaron's strikingly similar Children of Men (and our life-long admiration of Oliver Reed) drove us to track down a film print of Michael (The Mack) Campus' debut feature - just so we can see it again ourselves.

In the near future, the world is dying: everyone wears gas masks to deal with the extreme pollution, food is strictly rationed, the animals are dead or dying, and museums are instructional tools designed to show how the gluttony and waste of modern society destroyed the earth. To stem the rampant overpopulation, the one-world totalitarian government creates a new law that forbids child-bearing for 30-years. Those who want children are allowed to buy robot babies at the Babyshop. Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin are Russ and Carol McNeil, a couple who decide to break the law and give birth to the child they accidentally conceived.

Film List

The 4th Dimension
Belleville Book of the Dead
Big Bang Love, Juvenile A
Crimes of the Future
The Devil Dared Me To
Disquiet
The District!
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
End of the Line
Fingerprints
Freesia - Icy Tears
Gamera the Brave
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Hot Baby!
Jupiter Love
Living and the Dead
Nuit Noire
Pit Stop
Postal
The Secret Life of Sarah Sheldon
Short and Scary
Short and Really Scary
Spider Baby
Trail of the Screaming Forehead
Trapped Ashes
War of the Worlds
Welcome Home Brother Charles
The World Sinks (Except Japan)
Z.P.G.

Shorts

Akai
Anonymity
Ambassadors Day
Criticized
The Grandfather Paradox
The Handyman
Happy Birthday 2 You
In the Wall
The Listening Dead
Lump
Meter Maid Me Massacre
The Pit and the Pendulum
Red Harvest
Rhyme Animal

Opening Gala Party at 12 Galaxies
Live Acts and Dead Channels in the Hypnodrome