Zeta One (1969)

We have talked in the past about my dislike (okay, let’s call it “hatred”) of shaky cam filmmaking techniques.  Don’t worry; we’re not going to rehash that old saw today.  Today’s peccadillo is psychedelia in cinema.  In the 1960s, the youth culture was fed up with just about everything; war, consumerism, and all of the inequities of their parents’ society (real or perceived).  In the cause of opening up their minds, there was a growing trend in the use of psychedelic drugs.  These drugs can create a non sequiturial experience, and people felt that, via their various trips, they were being told the secrets to all of life and the universe (though I’m sure other people just relished the opportunity to escape from reality).  This experience, however, does not (in my opinion) usually make for good cinema.  The typical “trip” scene in a film from the late 60s on would consist of smash cuts to any variety of visual (the less coherent, the better), shots that look like the inside of a lava lamp, shots bled out with swirling colored lighting gels, shots of naked (they’re more likely than not covered in body paintings that make jailhouse tattoos look like the work of Goya but naked, nevertheless) hippies dancing and grooving out to the sitar-heavy score, and so on.  It all irritates the living hell out of me.  These scenes are ugly, vapid, and most ironic of all, clichéd (and I’m sure they have felt that way even from the very first).  I’m sure I’m being irrational about this to some extent, but it takes two to tango, as they say.  Some people get a headache from strobe lights.  I get a headache from head trip scenes.

Secret Agent James (Robin Hawdon) comes home to his hip, attic pad only to find sexy secretary Ann (Yutte Stensgaard) cooking up a little coq au vin.  After a bit of necking, Ann decides to grill Agent Word (as in “James’ Word is his Bond,” get it?) about his last mission in Scotland.  She decides to play strip poker for the information (yes, really), but eventually she winds up just banging him, after which James is more than happy to start giving up the goods (one wonders how he’d hold up under adverse conditions).  It seems Major Bourdon (James Robertson Justice) has been at war with the nation (Planet?  Island?  Dimension?) of Angvia for some time, and he wants to conquer the civilization, which is populated entirely by women and led by the titular Zeta (Dawn Addams).  ‘Nuff said. 

Michael Cort’s Zeta One (aka The Love Factor) was produced under the auspices of Tony Tenser’s Tigon British Film Productions banner.  Generally speaking (and I am no expert, though I know of at least one book in regards to the subject – Beasts In The Cellar by John Hamilton – though I can’t attest to its quality), the studio produced cheap Horror and Sexploitation films (though I believe there were one or two more serious films to come out of the company) to compete with the classier (and better-produced) output of Hammer Films.  Of Tigon’s total body of work, I would think that film fans are most familiar with Michael Reeves’ great Witchfinder General, and rightfully so.  Sexploitation Comedies like this one (Zeta One, not Witchfinder General) are the type of affairs which play it fast and loose with whatever trends are popular at the moment, and they are generally pretty sloppy in execution.  This movie is no exception.  The opening twenty-plus minutes of the film, which should either draw us into some type of story or, at the absolute minimum, do something to titillate the viewer (the old “Boobs Or Blood Every Ten Minutes” tenet) does neither.  Instead, we get a little bit of teasing and one of the longest card game scenes I’ve ever witnessed (minus the tension of, say, Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale).  Worse than that, once the strip poker game does start to actually get interesting, the editing suddenly switches to a lame montage style and drops the viewer back off at square one, exhausted and exasperated.  We have learned next to nothing, and it feels distinctly like our time has been wasted, despite what female flesh is on display.

The rest of the film plays out as a flashback, but even the framing device of the film is hamfisted and sloppy.  James and Ann spend minutes doling out exposition, rather than setting up the story quickly and allowing the rest of the film to play out of its own volition.  The editing of the remainder of Zeta One is just as horrid.  Outside of the basic concept, the scenes don’t connect together in any coherent way (and not that this endorses the psychedelic angle; it’s simply poor filmmaking and extremely irritating).  Scenes happen (a few are even sort of intriguing), but they don’t advance anything in the film.  They just take up time and move on (kind of like a feature length version of The Benny Hill Show, without the sophistication).  The key question that has to be asked then is, “does it matter in this context?”  Isn’t a film like this better off not making one whit of sense?  Wouldn’t having something like a plot just get in the way of checking out nekkid chicks?  Isn’t asking for more from a film like this just being a bit snobby?  Perhaps.  But I’ve seen hardcore porn that had more of a story than this movie, for good or ill, and better made porn, at that.  

The big draw to the film, of course, is the very concept of Angvia.  A place populated entirely by women is something straight out of the early pulps, and for us comic book fans, we’re familiar with it from Wonder Woman’s Themyscira/Paradise Island (Zeta even looks similar to that comics’ Hippolyta), and let’s not forget the fabled Amazonian culture of warrior women.  The Sapphic connotations are self-evident, and William Moulton Marston’s penchant for bondage in the early Wonder Woman books is hinted at in the Angvian warriors’ “uniforms,” which consist largely of purple lengths of rope and pasties.  Of course, on the opposite side are Bourdon and his male cronies (one of whom is named Swyne and played by skinny nebbish Charles Hawtrey).  The two factions are opposites in almost every way (aside from the obvious).  The men are crude and warlike (Bourdon even has an “interrogation room,” essentially a dungeon where women are tortured and, I assume, killed).  The women are peaceful and quasi-aristocratic but can still handle themselves in a fight.  The men rely on mechanical weapons.  The women can kill by channeling some inner power.  Of course, the one thing the women cannot do without men is get pregnant and perpetuate their race.  To be surrounded by beautiful women who just want to have sex is the big carnal fantasy of a good many men (or at least of a good many adolescent boys).  And even though some animal vestige hangs onto this fantasy beyond puberty, it doesn’t make the thought any less ridiculous when depicted onscreen.

MVT:  It’s crass and nigh-Neolithic and probably contradictory to almost everything I’ve just written here, but the best thing in Zeta One is the birds.  And I don’t mean the kind with feathers.

Make Or Break:  The opening of this film is a major Break.  It is dull and silly and overlong, and it sets the viewer up for tedium and tits (in equal measure, I grant you).  And if you haven’t a problem with putting up with the one just to get to the other, then good for you.  You’re a better man than I am (apologies to Kipling).   

Score:  4.5/10   

The Sheriff And The Satellite Kid (1979)

I don’t think anyone actually likes being alone.  Oh, sure, after a time, you can get used to the solitude and even prefer it.  But as human beings, we are social animals, and it is our natural inclination to engage in communal activities with one another, even without physical contact (try to explain Facebook otherwise).  And so it is that we have the concept of the comedic duo.  The juxtaposition of disparate personalities between the straight man and the funny man creates humor in much the same way that a similar juxtaposition can create conflict and drama.  Yet, if one walks away from a Laurel and Hardy movie without a smile on their face, the double act has failed (it could more believably be argued that the viewer has no sense of humor in this case, but you see what I mean).  The duo is also different from a comedy troupe, because the personalities are more defined, the purpose more  focused.  You may not be able to name and describe the individual style of every cast member on Saturday Night Live, but you can easily recognize and delineate between Bud Abbott and Lou Costello or Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.  The comedic duo has to be polar opposites in order to complement each other in a way normal relationships simply don’t always work.  Even then, though, there are no guarantees.

A public furor has gripped Newnan, Georgia after a UFO was spotted landing over the small town.  As the locals panic and blame everything that goes haywire on aliens, the gruff-but-kindly Sheriff Hall (Bud Spencer) struggles to keep crime down as well as impart some sanity to his constituents.  When Mrs. Parkins reports that her son is missing, Hall finds the lad at the local amusement park.  Playing with the Parkins boy is another child (Cary Guffey) who gives his name as H7-25 and insists that he is from another planet.  Hoping to get the truth from the boy and return him to his parents, Hall takes H7-25 under his wing, but Captain Briggs (Raimund Harmstorf) of the Coast Guard (?!) wants to capture the alien boy in order to get a hold of the photonic laser which allows the kid to perform all sorts of wild feats.

Michele Lupo’s The Sheriff And The Satellite Kid (aka Uno Sceriffo Extraterrestre – Poco Extra E Molto Terrestre) is not The Champ.  Neither is it The Kid or even Cop And A Half.  Ostensibly though, this film is about father and sons.  It has no real option to not be (just look at the title).  While Hall is an imposing presence and just a little grumpy, he also has a big heart which hurts the film twofold.  First, it gives us no arc for Hall to come to love the kid, starting as he does from place of benevolence and quasi-amiability.  Second, it deprives us of any true sense of conflict for the portions of the picture which don’t involve either the military or Brennan (Joe Bugner), the town fuckup.  By that same token, H7-25 states that he is in essence a neglected child.  He says that his father, H7-24, gets angry when the boy is scared.  His world has no such thing as music.  He is supposed to be a child searching for a positive father figure.  Unfortunately, we never get the feeling that the boy is all that troubled by his home life and certainly not to the point that he must bond strongly to Hall, and Hall has no strong motivation to feel protective of H7-25.  

In fact, the film on the whole is little more than small, brief moments between “humorous” (and yes, that word needs to be in quotes) slugfests.  It could be argued that this film is aimed at the family market, but it would be much more accurate to state that it is in fact aimed at children almost exclusively.  There is nothing wrong with that, of course, but it also means that the filmmakers felt the need to play down to their assumedly dumb audience.  The humor is as broad as broad can be.  We get a porcine family who dress identically and are not only always eating but also are portrayed as just flat-out stupid.  Deputy Allen (Luigi Bonos) feels the undesirable desire to constantly rhyme his lines (and I suspect the English dubbing doesn’t do it any favors, in this regard) and he does all sorts of gymnastics despite his being in his late sixties.  Animals talk in generic, predictable ways (a horse sounds like Mr. Ed, a German shepherd has a Teutonic accent).  But worst of all is the rebarbative practice of playing and rewinding the film at various times to either convey the idea that the characters are dancing against their will or just to have them re-experience painful moments repeatedly.  I suppose there are those (child and adult alike) who would find this funny (hell, I still like fart jokes, usually), but its stultifying overuse makes the film a slog.

Children in film can often be either twee or annoying or both (witness Giovanni Frezza in The House By The Cemetery), and it must be said that Guffey himself does not wear out his welcome entirely in this regard.  However as a character, H7-25 is perplexing.  Remember the Great Gazoo on The Flintstones?  That’s this kid.  He unwaveringly goes around causing mischief for mischief’s sake and in ways which could be construed as (at least marginally) criminal.  He lets Brennan out of jail and out of his cuffs at various points (it’s possible he sees the good inside the curmudgeon before Hall does, but there’s no indication of this).  He squirts an Army General in the face with water.  He badmouths Hall to a horse right in front of the guy.  By all indications, H7-25 knows exactly what he’s doing.  He’s being a jerk of the highest order, and his father’s no picnic either, as he takes over Hall’s car and rams it through the town, smashing into all of the unconvincingly placed obstacles which litter the roads.  One almost gets the feeling that the Satellite Kid’s true aim is to pave the way for a hostile alien invasion (but that wouldn’t come until the sequel, Why Did You Pick On Me?, and the kid’s not directly involved there, anyway), stripping we human beings of our will to live and scouring our resolve to its very core.  I hope not.  They would be extremely nettlesome.

MVT:  For as much as I have ragged on this flick, the relationship between the Sheriff and the kid is really the best of it.  Bud Spencer is one of those guys who I believe is impossible to not find charming.  That he’s only allowed to have basically two modes (exasperated resignation and bemused geniality) in the film is not his fault, but he does them both very well.

Make Or Break:  The Break is the denouement between Hall and H7-25.  There is simply no heart to any of these proceedings (despite the entire film’s purpose of appealing to the audience’s).  We make no strong connection to either character, and therefore we could care less if these two ever see each other again.  The film practically states outright that we should have our hearts warmed by this point in the runtime, but sadly, it all simply feels like going through the motions.  So the final shot, which should be uplifting (or at the absolute minimum leave us grinning), just makes you want to turn it off and watch The Toy instead.

Score:  5/10  

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TerrorVision (1986)

Plato's Retreat was a Manhattan swinger's club started in the late 1970s by Larry Levenson. It basically gave people who want to have unfettered, heterosexual (and this was stressed by the management, though lesbianism was okay) intercourse a place to do so. The club and its owner(s) espoused the sort of hedonism that the era was known for before the rise of HIV/AIDS called attention to the perils of promiscuous, unprotected sex. Reportedly, Levenson structured the rules to ensure that the women outnumbered the men, and he provided multiple amenities for its members, including a sauna and pool. If you've ever seen the type of people who frequented discos (or were one yourself), then you know that they had a sort of primitivistic quality that seemed to produce a fine coating of…something with which they were perpetually glazed. I can only hope that Plato's Retreat had the overwhelming smell of chlorine permeating every square inch, at least some indication that the proprietors attempted to keep the premises and its (very) public conveniences somewhat hygienic. Unfortunately, I'd be willing to gamble that this was not the case, and the pool alone probably looked like the chunder-filled pool of Ted Nicolaou's TerrorVision. Now I don't know (nor do I care to know) what your particular bent is, but the mere thought of fuzzy, chunky, possibly-living things crawling all over my nethers is simply unromantic, my son.

Over a marvelously cheapjack alien world establishing shot, we are informed that we are on the planet Pluton looking at the Mutant Creature Disposal Unit section of the planetary Sanitation Department. Alien Pluthar (William Paulson) wrestles a mutant into the disposal and zaps the being off into space (via a cleverly undisguised USS Enterprise [the interstellar one, not the nautical one] model). After bouncing (replete with "funny" sound effects) off multiple planets as if they were pinball bumpers, the signal carrying the mutant winds up hitting (you guessed it) Earth. Meanwhile, jumpsuited, ascot-sporting dullard, Stanley Putterman (Gerrit Graham), finishes up installing his new satellite dish, while wife, Raquel (Mary Woronov), aerobicizes. Son, Sherman (Chad Allen), runs war games with military- and absent-minded Grampa (Bert Remsen), and punk daughter, Suzy (Diane Franklin), leaves to go on a date with metalhead boyfriend, O.D. (Jonathan Gries). I'll give you three guesses where the monster from the prologue lands.

Nicolaou's film (produced by the Brothers Band under the Empire Pictures banner) is first and foremost a satire of the "Me Generation" and their progeny. The screenplay (also written by Nicolaou) divides the characters up into three distinct subsets, each a broad stereotype. So, Stanley and Raquel are hedonistic swingers solely focused on their own pleasures. Suzy and O.D. are dimwitted, heavy metal enthusiasts. Sherman (as in the tank, get it?) and Grampa are warmongers who want to shoot first, ask questions later. When MAD Magazine does a satire (or at least when they used to), they very cleverly highlighted the most egregious faults of a movie, show, and/or genre in the short space they were provided. It helped that they were drawn in a caricatured style by such greats as Mort Drucker, Angelo Torres, Jack Davis, and others. They played, because they were already removed from reality by their medium, but to do the same in a live-action feature film is not nearly so easy. For starters, there's a lot of time to fill, and if you repeatedly crack the audience over the head with the same joke, they will tire of it quickly. Further, you have to overcome the hurdle of dealing with actors rather than drawings. Viewers instinctually want to connect with actors they see on screen (this is, after all, one of the primary reasons they go to the movies in the first place). But when they see a live-action cartoon peopled with one-dimensional parodies, there is a disconnect. 

Naturally, a film can still be effective and even enjoyable despite these things, but they are obstacles that require a deft hand behind the camera. Nicolau tries by filming the movie primarily on soundstages, thus granting himself a large degree of control (in theory). His lighting is garish and unnatural, similar to Bava's, and even the sky in the distance is purple and pink. The Putterman's are art consumers ("I know a place where you can get all this stuff real cheap") of the tackiest sort. Every painting on their walls has at least one bare nipple, and several depict light bondage. The Roman-style statue in the foyer has breasts that act as fountains. Every character is self-centered in one way or another, and their immobility in this regard makes them unappetizing (to the viewer, perhaps, but not to the monster). As I said, though, since the characters are only skin-deep in every conceivable way, you not only don't care what happens to them, but you want it to hurry up and happen faster. It's possible that this dearth of character was intended by Nicolaou as part of the lampoon, but it comes off mostly as lazy writing.

The filmmakers also use the film as a mild critique of television culture. The monster enters the house through the televisions. The characters think that Pluthar is a character in a movie when they see him pleading for us humans to render our TV sets inoperable for the next two hundred years. Grampa believes that only war stories and horror movies are educational, because they focus on survival (that's actually pretty sound reasoning). Horror host, Medusa (Jennifer Richards), dresses like a monster and puts on a performance while on air, but off air, she's just another egocentric phony. The concept of television being both alluring and dangerous is nothing new. Cronenberg's Videodrome covered the bases on the subject thoroughly. It's a subject that is ripe for investigation, but TerrorVision only gives it cursory attention (except in its background/symbolic context). The filmmakers also use real B-movie footage, rather than taking the time and (more importantly) money to come up with their own mini-parodies. And this leads to one of the film's biggest weaknesses. It is never consistent enough or fully committed enough to come together at the end. The characters flip-flop from likable to unlikable, reasonable to unreasonable and back for no other reason than that's how the director needs them to act for that scene. While there are some interesting notions in the film and it's worth a perfunctory glance (and it must be said, Graham and Woronov are excellent, as always), it's as if Nicolaou were channel-surfing in his mind as he wrote the screenplay. And that can be really annoying when you're not in control of the remote.

MVT: Buechler's monster is slimy and interesting to look at (and you get to see a lot of it), and best of all, it's huge. You have to give the man credit for being able to pull off a creature creation like that for a low budget film. You get the feeling that everyone was so impressed with it that they included it in more of the picture and rightfully so.

Make Or Break: The moment that Grampa shows up in military dress with toy fighter jets glued to his hat, the viewer suddenly realizes that they can erase all hope for any attempt at subtlety from their minds. From that point on, whether you enjoy the film or not depends completely and utterly on how easy you are to please. I admit I can be a little more difficult in this regard than some.

Score: 5.5/10

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Flesh Gordon (1974)

Strange sex rays have been bombarding the Earth, causing groups of people to erupt in spontaneous orgies. The leaders and scientists of the world, including Professor Gordon (John Hoyt), are baffled. Meanwhile, the professor's son and all-around great hockey player, Flesh (Jason Williams), is flying back home (on the only airplane I've ever seen with rattan chairs for seats). In flight, Flesh meets cute with Dale Ardor (Suzanne Fields), but before the two can get to know each other, another sex ray hits the plane. Flesh and Dale barely escape with their lives, but they meet up with famous (or infamous) paranoid scientist, Dr. Flexi Jerkoff (Joseph Hudgins), who has discovered where the rays are coming from (the planet Porno). The trio makes off (or out) for the planet in Jerkoff's penis-shaped spaceship. After being forced to crash land on Porno, Flesh, Dale, and Jerkoff partake in a series of adventures in their quest to defeat the evil Wang the Perverted (William Hunt).

Pornography carries different connotations in different contexts. To some, it's something as simple as the baring of the human body in all its glory. To others, it's the graphic depiction of sexual intercourse. To still others, explicit violence and gore is considered pornographic. There are even those who find pornography in the use of words alone (just ask Lenny Bruce or "Penthouse Forums"). In the obscenity case surrounding the film, The Lovers, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously stated, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hardcore pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." Slightly less famously, Jello Biafra, when detailing his obscenity trial for including H.R. Giger's Work 219: Landscape XX (aka Penis Landscape) with his band Dead Kennedys' album "Frankenchrist," described the "prurient interest" (the crux of the case against him) as (and I'm paraphrasing here), "if you look at it, and it makes you wanna whack off." Much less famously (unless you're a dork like me) but more amusingly, the cover of issue sixteen of Betty And Me shows Archie Andrews carting off casual sweetheart, Betty at the local water hole. In response to her question, "Archie, did you have any trouble rescuing me?" his reply is, "I sure did, Betty! I had to beat off three other guys!"  Naturally, there are three bruised up rivals in the water behind him, but if all you did was hear that line, would you consider that pornographic? Maybe. Maybe not. 

Taking a cue from Mr. Biafra, then, should porn appeal to more than the prurient interest? I'm sure pornography has been with us in some form or another going all the way back to the time of cave paintings. By that same token, the genre has straddled (wow, the double entendres on this are unavoidable) both sides of this query. Like cinema's beginning, when Eadweard Muybridge discovered flicker fusion while trying to answer the question of whether or not all four of a horse's hooves leave the ground while galloping (incidentally, they do), porn has been both plotless and plot-centric. 

Short loops simply depicting folks doing "the nasty" have existed alongside more involved productions (along the lines of "what the butler saw" style narratives) for years before graduating into full-blown features. And yet, even a porno with the most well-developed and verisimilitudinous of plots and three-dimensional characters is still a porno. The sex scenes are integral to their existence (and for the sake of our discussion here, we'll only consider the "sexual congress" angle of pornography), and while they can be enjoyed by themselves (appealing to the most base of desires as they do), having a contextual framework around these scenes can provide not only an additional level of enjoyment but also partially legitimates their production in the eyes of filmmakers and viewers alike (though not necessarily in the eyes of those predisposed to disliking them in the first place). The above question regarding appeal, then, becomes answerable only when framed by the individual viewer's perspective. But that doesn't mean that you can't like it both ways.

As a production, Flesh Gordon is not much to write home about. The 16mm cinematography is alternately blurry or just plain ugly. The compositions consist of establishing shots and medium to medium close-up shots. The camera is primarily static. That said, the visual and special effects (most notably some nice, low budget stop motion work by David Allen and Jim Danforth, here pseudonymously credited as Mij Htrofnad, as well as some early-ish work by Rick Baker) are, for the most part, thoughtful and effective. The shots involving effects all seem (at least to my jaundiced eye) to have not only a stronger sense of composition but also a predilection to actually move the camera. Really, they are one of the film's strongest assets, and they deliver.

Inevitably, then, how does this little opus stack up on a pornographic level? Can it even be called pornography? Yes, I think it can. It goes further in terms of not only amounts of skin shown but how they're shown than other sex comedies. Is there penetration? None is graphically on display, though if you look carefully at the extras in the background of Wang's throne room, there's some genuine nookie going on, as well as some definite handies being applied to definitely turgid members. In fact, the only scene that is treated stylistically like hardcore porn is the love scene between Flesh and Amora (Mycle Brandy) (complete with funky, wahwah pedal guitar licks but without onscreen intromission). My understanding (and I find this very easy to believe) is that live-action co-directors, Howard Ziehm and Michael Benveniste, did film hardcore sex scenes, but they were edited out of the film. My guess would be because porn was considered in many areas to be a criminal enterprise for the majority of the Seventies, and the filmmakers wanted to (understandably) avoid prosecution. It would be interesting to re-look at the film if this material ever resurfaced. Further, the actors are not particularly attractive (as was the norm for the time in this type of affair), but everyone seems to be having a real ball (ahem). 

And this is the film's other saving grace. The film and filmmaker's attitude is one of reverence and playful satire for the works that inspired it. This is stated outright in an opening text scroll extolling the pulp serials of the Thirties and Forties, from Captain Marvel to (the original) Flash Gordon. The film is a romp, "in the spirit of burlesque." Throw in some broad (and some subtle), bawdy humor, some death traps that you have no idea how our heroes will get out of but still know to a certainty they will (just like in the infamous cliffhangers of yore which invariably resulted in a cheat of some form or another), some naked people rolling around and groping each other, and you get a film that, technically, is only worthwhile on an effects lover's level, yet still exudes a mischievous sense of adventure that makes the whole thing go down (ahem, again) a pleasant enough treat.

MVT: The overall sense of delight makes up for the majority of the film's deficiencies. If it wasn't for this mien, the film wouldn't be overly appealing to anyone other than special effects devotees, I think. Still, this would make a hell of a party movie.

Make Or Break: The Make is the airplane scene. Everything to enjoy about the film is contained herein. You have some okay effects, some action and adventure, a mildly fun-looking orgy, and that pervasive sense of amusement that holds the whole affair together.

Score: 6.75/10

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