Zeta One (1975)

Fantastic!

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

This is for the DVD: the Blu-ray has been letter boxed, and so loses half its greatest merit.The film slowly gained notoriety after I wrote an article in the lads magazine 'Loaded' in 1993,headlined 'The Worst British Film Ever?'. The question-mark was Loaded's addition. I'd videotaped it from a cable channel's late-night exploitation movies, where you could see more of TV actresses trying to break into film than TV itself would show in those days. The cable channel picked only the cheapest films it could rent, but even among that dross Zeta One was a car crash.In those days videotapes were expensive, and only mainstream films were distributed. I never expected to hear of the film again. But a cuttings agency had sent a copy of my article to Tigon, and it went on file. I'm guessing someone in marketing recognised that even the badge of worst British film ever had market value, because I saw it referred to in the sleeve notes of a Tigon DVD box set, and the film itself was in the second wave of Tigon's videotapes, about the same time as Au Pair Girls: the 'so bad it's good' culture began about that time. Tigon must have been deeply hacked-off by Zeta One, because normally you make only a passing reference to your failures. But John Hamilton's exemplary account of Tigon, 'Beasts in the Cellar' devotes nearly as much space to the film as to the company's triumphs, like 'Witchfinder General'.We don't get to choose what we are remembered for, and my memorial, and that in a very narrow circle, will be giving cult status to a piece of tosh. C'est la vie. That said, this film could replace the first three weeks of a film course in almost any discipline. It is so obvious what went wrong that you know afterwards what is right about other films.Starting with the script, what was originally filmed was full of plot holes and missing information, and as filmed ran for sixty minutes or less. It stayed on the shelves before the producer decided to add framing scenes explaining what had happened. Enter Yutte Stensgaard as a sort of nude Dr Watson ("Tell me, Holmes, how did you know that...?").Secondly, a job you've never thought of before: the production accountant. The inexperienced director spent lavishly on props and location shooting that the budget of £60,000 could not possibly justify. It is, in fairness, all on the screen: gorgeous costumes for the beautiful all-girl aliens, and the finest Finnish furniture film ever made (only one other, I think: Billion-Dollar Brain).Third, actors. If you want to treat actors like cattle, you'd better be Hitchcock. Michael Cort so wasn't Hitchcock. James Robertson Justice, the principal villain, was so angry that he refused to come back for 'fills', and someone else had to do his voice and hand giving a spy a knock-out pill, essential to the plot.Fourth, make-up: the gorgeous Valerie Leon, actress in many Carry On films, appears topless in Zeta One. I found this out only years later. Her make-up disguises her utterly without enhancing her character.Fifth,props, carpenters, lighting: that generation of British techies were wonderfully professional. Why, then did they treat the director with such contempt? The film is lit as lifelessly as a cheap ITV drama of the period. The distinctive Saarinen "Tulip" tables and chairs are replaced by hideous clunky Scandinavian furniture in one scene, and it says much for the strip-poker scene that I noticed the pedestal of one chairs still had packing dirt on it. I wrote in 'Loaded' of another scene "Their lovemaking was both intense and prolonged, so much so that they didn't notice builders had come in and installed a bathroom that wasn't there before".Actually, if you want to be a camera operator or director, do get the Blu-ray: you will see at once that the natural tendency of a camera is to focus on the centre of the action. This is why so many films don't work on disc: the re-framing from the 4:3 Academy ration most films of the era were shot in to TV-filling 16:9 loses key details, in this case much of the film's only merit, Yutte Stensgaard's beautiful bottom.Lastly, Lorna Selwyn, who is credited for Continuity in the film. This is unfair. She must have been constantly over-ridden by a director running out of time and money. Previously she'd worked for master craftsmen like Eric Sykes, on The Plank, and she continued to work for Tigon afterwards.So, a paradox: this is a rotten film, and I thoroughly recommend it.In 80 minutes or so you will gain an understanding that many skilled crafts go into making a good film. For Londoners, alas, there is another, sad, reason to cherish the film: one of the most unnecessary location shots was of Berwick Street Market, which is now being closed down so advertising and PR people can get to their coffee shops a few seconds quicker.

Most of the time, when you watch a film, you think about the film itself, the narrative, the people in it, the cinematography etc. In this case, you spend half the time wondering what the film-makers were trying to do. It really is worth emphasising what a weirdie this one is. Weird in a bad way.It is incredibly disjointed. The stars remain completely separated. James Robertson Justice and Charles Hawtrey are in one lot of scenes. Robin Hawdon sans moustache and Yutte Stensgaard are in another lot. RH avec moustache is in a third lot, and Dawn Addams appears in a fourth. There is no overlap between these. The opening twenty minutes with the charisma-free Hawdon & dear old Yutte playing strip poker are so excruciatingly dull that you wonder how many people lasted the course in the days before fast forward buttons. Or maybe pause buttons.Of course the story is intended to be quirky, and the makers were obviously going for a Barbarella-type vibe. OK, but this one is downright strange. Some of the odd bits include: a completely unmotivated dialogue between James Word and a grumpy lift; the bizarre incident of James Word's moustache, revealed as false in the opening scene; overdubs of Major Bourdon's added dialogue, which sound nothing like James Robertson Justice, but passably like Basil Brush; James Word being fed an aphrodisiac diet of oysters and what appears to be Mackeson Stout; the British secret service employing an American boss and a Scandinavian secretary; the mystery of why Charles Hawtrey's bottom is bitten by one of his own dogs.Other commentators have unpicked the relationships between the various bits of the film - it looks like the Justice/Hawtrey scenes were shot first, and then the Hawdon/moustache scenes shot to make sense of them, and then the Hawdon/no moustache scenes shot to make sense of them. Stensgaard's lines about what rubbish it all is are clearly a tongue-in-cheek admission of the blindingly obvious. Naturally, the whole thing is a thin excuse for some girlie nudity (and that also is laid on thicker in the scenes shot later, as if they realised that nudity would be the film's only saving grace). The basic idea of topless aliens invading Earth is a very amusing one. But given the cast there really is no excuse for making such an awful picture.The nadir of the film is the jokey kidnap-and-torture sequence about half way through. Not erotic, just a gigantic lapse of taste, unredeemed by the reappearance of the kidnapped girl towards the end. That is the problem with this film in its most egregious aspect - it is just not likable enough.

years ago i purchased this drive in double feature from the company; sinister cinema,the 2nd film is;when women had tails(70)it also features all the drive in intermission countdowns,snack bar stuff,etc; anyway zeta one(titled love factor on this double bill)is a fun James bondish spoof from 1969,it features lots of soft core nudity,and psychedelic images.its about an amazon like race of scantily clad superwomen that must fight enemy agents and such,robin hawden(when dinosaurs ruled the earth)is a secret agent like James bond who discovers the amazon race and helps them.its no classic but its a rarity to see a film like this.its drive in fare the 2nd feature however is very silly and lowbrow.but entertaining.look for sexy Valerie Leon,the busty brunette actress from hammers;blood from the mummy's tomb(74)as one of the amazonions.i thought it was a silly but entertaining little film.i recommend it.8 out of 10.

Spoilers: included.Kicking off the sporadic genre of British comedies that served up softcore nudity with sci-fi trimmings, 1969's Zeta One was itself based on a short lived photo-magazine that obsessed on models scantily dressed in futuristic clothes. At its liveliest the film contains recreations of kinky photo-shoot favourites like catfights and underwear clad dollies in torture chamber tableau, as well as colourful scenes of alien women discreetly disguised in identical black wigs and thigh-high Carnaby Street fashions. Sadly the movie version of Zeta One is also saddled with the tiresome exploits of Robin Hawdon -wooden lead of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth- playing a poor man's James Bond.Slow to start the film's first quarter of an hour is a mercilessly static two-hander between Hawdon and his boss's secretary as they drink, deliver pages of inconsequential dialogue and generally make goo-goo eyes at each other. Despite containing the film's first show of flesh- they also get round to playing strip-poker- this is padding at its most painful and just seems to go on forever. Eventually Hawdon narrates flashbacks of some 'very extraordinary business' concerning the Angvians, a strange race of women from outer space who kidnap pretty girls then brainwash them with kaleidoscope-type optical effects. One such abductee, Soho stripper Edwina Strain ('please call me Ted') gets bustled into a car by Angvian women in broad daylight then is treated to a guided tour of their lair. Looking like the set of a Children's programme, Angvian HQ includes such delights as the 'the contemplation room', 'the self revelation room' and not forgetting 'the static time area'. Incredulously in the middle of this already ridiculous scenario up pops Charles Hawtrey- clearly in a pay cheque role between Carry On's- as Swyne, the second in command of a sinister organisation out to put an end to the Angvian's capers. Campy and cowardly as ever, Hawtrey's Carry On persona dictates his character as he follows Angvian women around London only to get on the wrong side of a far more terrifying force in irate Bus clippie Rita Webb.Understandably Hawdon struggles to make any sense out these events, and with alien women and misplaced comedy veterans rubbing shoulders lets face it who wouldn't. Indeed when he relates the tall tale to the secretary as pillow talk she responds with 'oh you're making this rubbish up', a fine epitaph for the film. A virtually asleep James Robertson Justice plays the film's villain Major Bourdon, a roly-poly and seemingly inebriated creep who enjoys chasing alien women around his Scottish estate as if they were game. Robertson Justice's complete apathy towards appearing in the film is all up there on screen, he clearly hasn't learnt the script. At one stage Director Michael Cort reportedly had to tape Bourdon's dialogue to the actor's trouser leg. Cheekily, during the scene in question Cort inserts leery shots of a girl's thighs to 'explain' Robertson Justice's motivation for spending much of the scene glancing down.There is more than a hint of post-production troubles in the final film. The disjoined feel gives the impression large amounts of plot ended up on Tigon's cutting room floor, particularly noticeable is the lack of a dramatic comeuppance for Bourdon with Robertson Justice simply disappearing towards the end. The film's biggest abnormality though has to the Hawdon character. Very much like Ken Parry in Come Play with Me, Hawdon is always kept at arm's length from the main story and is never called upon to mingle with most of the other characters. All of which fuels suspicion that Hawdon's scenes were either shot separately or merely added by Tigon in an attempt to make sense of it all, he does after all spend the first 15 minutes desperately trying to explain the upcoming plot! His scenes bear all the hallmarks of a regular Tigon ghost director in their blandness and opportunistic employment of full female nudity and sex scenes to spice up a film that otherwise offers nothing hotter than topless women prancing around in asexual situations. Hawdon's mysterious lack of interaction with the rest of the characters is most hilariously obvious in his absence from the climatic bust up between alien women and men in deerstalker hats. The reason he's unable to join in the fight? ........he has to go back to his car to collect some Wellington boots! The climax also serves as the film's inglorious highlight with 'starlets as alien women' running around the British countryside freezing their backsides off while pretending to fire invisible rays from their hands, and trying (and in one instance failing) not to break out laughing. Whilst Euro-trouper Brigitte Skay managed to drum up a fair amount of publicity for the film- photos of her in a revealing space-age bikini earned Zeta One the cover of both Continental Film Review and Cinema X magazine -it wasn't until the 1995 video re-release that the film really found an audience. On video and DVD the film has since gone on to achieve a degree of novelty status on account of many of its female cast members later finding success in Hammer horror and comedy roles. Not that many of these actresses have fond memories of the production, Yutte Stensgaard claimed she felt exploited by her then father-in-law/manager who in a spivvy turn didn't tell her about her nude scenes until she turned up on set, while the late Imogen Hassall was known to joke a higher force must have been looking out for her the day she turned down the opportunity to play an 'Angvian girl'. Valerie Leon's sole memory of the production was one movie wonder Cort being a somewhat strange chap. Then again if you've seen the film you've probably guessed that already.