Zeta One (1969)

A sexy sci-fi caper starring a bevvy of naked alien astronauts and Charles Hawtrey?

The first attempt to mix British sex comedy with an episode of Star Trek, Zeta One is partially based on a comic strip that appeared in short-lived fantasy magazine Zeta in the late 1960s.

Adapted for the big screen by writer/director Michael Cort, the story is told in flashback by British secret agent James Word (played with the minimum amount of effort by Robin Hawdon), whose prime objectives are shagging blonde girls in his funky plastic apartment and smoking in bed. Apart from that, he does absolutely nothing but talk a lot.

His boss, ‘W’ (Lionel Murton), despatches his nubile secretary, Ann Olsen (Yutte Stensgaard), to visit James at home for an intimate chat (pictured).

James immediately wants to slip Ann a few classified inches. She, however, just wants to hear him recount his latest top-secret mission.

They agree to compromise by playing strip poker first, a laboriously sluggish game, the build-up to which lasts some 15 brain-numbing minutes . . .

In flashback we see that Zeta (Dawn Addams) is the leader of a giant colony of extraterrestrial superwomen from the planet Angvia (it’s an anagram for the lady bits, geddit?) who abduct earth-women, brainwash them and transport them back to their world through a time machine.

The only benefit seems to be that the women get to wear long black wigs, suede mini-dresses and white, thigh-high patent leather boots.

As the Angvians continue their spree of kidnapping – using Valerie Leon as their chief abductor – the aliens’ activities come to the attention of gruff master criminal and ‘public enemy number one’ Major Bourdon and his simpering, effeminate ‘henchman’, Swyne.

Played by James Robertson Justice and Charles Hawtrey respectively, this has to be the low point of both men’s careers. These baffling star turns culminate in the bizarre, and not entirely welcome, spectacle of Justice and Hawtrey torturing a topless Carol Hawkins (an Angvian girl they have kidnapped) on a medieval rack (pictured below).

A bunch of topless Angvians – naked bar skimpy knickers and the icing from Midget Gems stuck on their nipples – invade Justice’s secret hideaway en masse and do battle with his calamitous band of tweed-capped gamekeepers.

Suddenly all is well in the mysterious world of large-breasted space ladies and even secret agent Hawdon gets abducted by Yutte (an alien in disguise, you see) and made to inseminate all the Angvian women in a prolonged bout of fifth-dimensional sperm donation.

Zeta One is camp, colourful space-junk enlivened only by Martin Gascoigne’s innovative set design – big plastic shapes, shimmering foil walls and flashing multi-coloured chequer-board lights – and a sequence or two filmed through a lava lamp.

The endless rushing-about and cheap special effects are basic in the extreme, and if it weren’t for the topless lovelies you would definitely think this was filmed for the entertainment of children.

Released in some markets as The Love Factor.

James Word
Robin Hawdon
Ann Olsen
Yutte Stensgaard
Major Bourdon
James Robertson Justice
Swyne
Charles Hawtrey
Zeta
Dawn Addams
W
Lionel Murton
Clotho
Anna Gael
Atropos
Valerie Leon
Lachesis
Brigitte Skay
Zara
Carol Hawkins
Edwina Strain
Wendy Lingham
Bourdon’s Man
Paul Baker
Angvians
Angela Grant
Nita Lorraine
Vikki Richards

Director
Michael Cort

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