wilvram Surely one of the most tatty, inept, and certainly most bonkers productions from a British studio since 'Fire Maidens From Outer Space' over a dozen years previously, it seems Zeta One was originally planned on a considerably more ambitious scale, only to soon run into financial trouble.John Hamilton, Tony Tenser's indispensable chronicler, reveals that construction work on the studio had still not been completed during shooting. James Robertson Justice didn't have a proper dressing room and understandably was not pleased. Not in the best of health following a stroke the year before, he made sure he was out of the mess at the first opportunity. Anyhow he's completely wrong, and not in any good way, as the sadistic Major Bourdon. They'd have done better to have cast the amazonian Nita Lorraine, the 'Angvian' failing to keep a straight face in the fight scene (and briefly memorable wielding a whip in 'Curse Of The Crimson Altar') as Zeta's adversary, or to take it to a further stage of silliness, Rita Webb, who puts in an appearance as a bus conductor with Charles Hawtrey in a scene that misses a chance to be funnier.Robin Hawdon's James Word, so called apparently so they could use a hilarious tag-line on the lines of 'His Word is our Bond' and whose main activity seems to be confined to between the sheets, only function is to attempt to make sense of what passes for the narrative. Mission impossible. One flashback confusingly ends with him in bed with one of the Angvians before switching to him in the same bed with Yutte Stensgaard, as part of the framing device. A typically inane scene toward the end sees him drive up to a field, go through a hedge and then wander around, then back to the car for some waterproofs. And that's it. Meanwhile Dawn Addams' Zeta remains a peripheral figure throughout.At least Zeta can boast Johnny Hawksworth's jazzy, driving opening score, and the costume department made delightful use of their minuscule budget on the wigs and outfits, if that is the word, of Zeta's followers: Valerie Leon, for one, can rarely have looked more alluring. Anyhow, once the deadly tedious opening sequence was out of the way, it was more fun than the laboured attempts at humour of Joe Losey's infinitely more prestigious 'swinging sixties' spoof, Modesty Blaise, which I also watched recently.

nickgillies1 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.

JAvatar80 Found this little gem on Netflix streaming. The story seems made up as they went along, the "action" scenes make WWE look like real fighting, and sometimes I wasn't sure how the characters were supposed to be feeling. It was a great movie.Between the dated, Andy Worhal-esque style, with the actors and actresses taking themselves seriously, and the points mentioned in the first paragraph, this turned out to be a side-splitting hilarious film. This is one of those "so bad it's good" kind of films. A few spots were a little slow, but everything around them more than made up for them.As my wife said, "If I wouldn't be embarrassed to say I saw this movie, I would recommend it to a friend!"

gavcrimson 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.