British sex comedies are usually insufferable, especially when they lean heavy into the “comedy” aspects of the genre. This one is so confusing and stupid that you won’t even have time to laugh at the jokes. You’ll be too busy trying to figure out what they hell is going on.
A secret agent comes home to find his secretary raring for a midnight rendezvous. After a few drinks, a game of strip poker, and some (offscreen) lovemaking, he tells her all about his latest mission. It seems a race of alien women were going around London and abducting strippers. He probably would’ve gotten to the bottom of things if he wasn’t so damned busy getting it on with a bunch of hot blondes.
Zeta One looks like it began life as a sci-fi sex comedy. Somewhere along the line, the producers must’ve demanded they change gears and turn it into a James Bond spoof. The Bond-ish opening goes on forever and it takes a good twenty minutes before he even mentions the aliens. These scenes look like they were thrown together in a day or two and the strip poker sequence seemingly plays out in real time. This portion of the film must’ve been filmed way after the sci-fi stuff because the secret agent is missing his mustache in these scenes. In fact, when he’s introduced, he removes a false one, as if he was in disguise or something, but all that does is call attention to the conspicuous continuity error later on. I mean, all he had to so is say he shaved. There was no need to go into all that fake mustache shit at the very beginning.
The stuff with the sexy aliens feels incomplete as I’m sure there was a lot of footage that got scrapped to make way for the James Bond subplot. There’s even a scene where the aliens sit around and watch a monitor playing what looks like footage the editor couldn’t cram elsewhere into the picture. The aliens themselves aren’t anything special either. The women all wear Egyptian-inspired make-up, funny wigs, and kooky outfits. The only memorable part is the training sequence where a bunch of alien women wearing bikini bottoms and pasties perform in a brief Kung Fu tournament, but it’s over before you can really enjoy it.
Zeta One has an acceptable amount of T & A, but even the nudity (which is really quite tame) can’t save the movie. Since the whole mess has been cobbled together so incoherently, that means just as it feels like it’s about to end, it doesn’t. Instead, it cuts to another set of characters and it keeps right on going. This happens about three or four times, and each false ending seems longer than the one that preceded it.
There might’ve been a kernel of a decent sex spoof here if the seams weren’t so glaringly evident. However, the crummy craftsmanship and shoddy storytelling ultimately sink it. Because of that, Zeta One is a big fat zero.
AKA: The Love Factor. AKA:
Alien Women.
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