Zeta One (UK, 1969)

“Don’t Be Afraid/She Only Wants Love!”

Bootilicious semi-naked ladies in the title sequence and shwinging 60s musak introduce us to Zeta who is “all around you/yet not here at all” And in case we can’t spell, then the singer helps us out. It’s “Zee Eee Teee Aaaaa” and she’s “the feeling of love/from a girl so warm/but mysterious”.

That title sequence looks and sounds fab, but really doesn’t help at all when trying to figure out what the blazes is going on in this movie.

Apparently it is about Zeta (Dawn Addams) who comes from a different galaxy, surrounds herself with a colony of gorgeous babes and tries to take over our world, but in a good way or something.

A secret agent called James - no, not that one – Word (who incidentally reports to someone called W: Reverse that!) stumbles into the first scene all complete with a fake 60s tache and then spends the next 20 minutes of the film playing strip poker with Miss Olsen (Yutte Stensgaard). Now I really don’t mind spending such an inordinate amount of time ogling at this beautiful Swede in the buff, but still must admit that this hardly makes for ingenious script writing.

In actual fact it is amazing that any plot as feeble as that was chosen by Tigon who produced it to help set up a company to rival the likes of Hammer and Amicus. If it wasn’t for a bunch of actors and actresses who are generally better known for their appearances in Hammer films and Carry On style productions, it is doubtful that anyone these days would still remember the movie. What drove such a relatively eclectic cast to agree to appear in such drivel is beyond comprehension. Hard to believe any of them had ever read the script, if even there was one.

Following the strip poker sequence, Word and Olson jump into bed and Word narrates what had happened previously.

Y’see, Word (Robin Hawden) is the world’s most incompetent agent (not a spy, as he himself insists) and was ordered to investigate the disappearance of a series of gals from all over the world. Without really doing anything else but jumping into bed with any girl that crosses his path, he discovers that they were kidnapped by Zeta to be brainwashed and serve in Angvia.

Angvia is out in space somewhere, but perhaps it’s not, perhaps it’s right here in a different time scale or something. All we know is that it exists. If you think this sounds vague: Believe me, it is pretty much quoted verbatim from the dialogue.

All of that really is an excuse to see as many topless 60s girls as possible. How nice that the Angvians are generally not only dressed in the most cleverly designed topless swimsuits (courtesy of Colette Du Plessis), but they also make sure that one of their victims is a stripper (Wendy Lingham).

James Robertson Justice and Charles Hawtrey are part of a group of men who aim to capture Zeta and destroy her operation. In order to do so they’re not averse to torturing an Angvian. That violent, fetishistic torture sequence is strangely out of place in this generally more comic titillation caper. When they stage a Most Dangerous Game style (wo)manhunt, their group gets killed by the invading topless ladies, one of them being Valerie Leon. These appealing aliens have a superior power that helps them win over the men: They can shoot invisible bullets out of their fingers! Ever improvised a cowboys and Indians game as a kid with nothing but your empty hands as revolvers? Well, that’s the general idea in those ridiculous looking fight scenes. The term “budgetary restraints” must have been invented for that production.

Even the most hardened admirer of this film must admit that it is ridiculous to the extreme. It does, however, make for some titillating viewing. It’s a Must for Hammer Glamour fans: Yutte Stensgaard has her most memorable part in this film. The expression “Everything But the Nipple” (generally associated with this actress) must have originated for Valerie Leon in this film as she does display pretty much her entire body if it wasn’t for a micro bikini bottom and one of those stripper nipple protectors that display, well, everything but the nipple. Dawn Addams is the only lady who does not display her wares. The spaceship (insemination room included) makes for some fun psychedelic viewing. And, in case I haven’t said it enough, it also has Yutte Stensgaard. In the nude. A lot.

Robin Hawden, who played the stumbling and womanising secret agent, subsequently went on to bigger and better things, by, ahem, next starring in Hammer’s When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970). He also wrote a couple of books, some which can still be bought from Amazon and Amazon UK.

Look closely and you can also discover Kirsten Lindholm as one of the Angvisa girls.

Hammer what ifs and if onlys

by Matthew ConiamI first watched Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb on the 23rd of December, 1983. I was ten years old, and by the time 1984 rolled round I’d seen it at least twice more. Since then it’s become a regular Christmas ritual, and I’ve often written about my uncertainty as to the ratio of objectivity to nostalgia informing my conviction that it is by a comfortable margin the best film Hammer ever made in the nineteen-seventies.
But could it have been even better? It was very nearly considerably different. I’m not sure how much difference it would have made to the end product if director Seth Holt had lived long enough to supervise the final cut: it's to Michael Carreras’s credit that the film never overtly betrays the presence of a substitute director.
What is regrettable, however, is the loss of Peter Cushing in the central role of Professor Fuchs. Not because there’s much wrong with Andrew Keir, Cushing’s last minute replacement when he left the film to tend his ailing wife: there isn’t. But all Hammer fans know that a Cushing performance adds to any movie. It's partly that he spells Hammer like no other actor, and his presence is so reassuring a symbol of continuity in the studio’s output, a fixed point in the studio's fifties, sixties and seventies incarnations. It’s such a shame he wasn’t able to lend that presence to this one. Had he done so, I think we’d all be calling the film a masterpiece.
.
I suspect all Hammer fans have their own list of what ifs - not just the might have beens and the nearly weres, but also the if onlys, where our imaginations run wilder even than that of James Carreras looking at a picture of Victoria Vetri and a rubber dinosaur.
As well as the Hammer films that really did nearly star Cary Grant, Brigitte Bardot and Vincent Price there are those which were never even considered but of which I dream all the same: Barbara Steele in The Vampire Lovers, for instance.
But no fantasy casting can seem as odd today as the genuine what if prospect of Bernard Bresslaw as the Creature in Curse of Frankenstein.
The irony has been noted that Christopher Lee owed his Hammer career to the very thing that had stood in his way as a leading man hitherto: his slightly otherworldly demeanour and his considerable height. But how much stranger that those same characteristics might have made a horror icon of Bernie! All the studio were looking for when casting the role, when Bresslaw was top of their list, was physical suitability, and Bresslaw would certainly have fit the bill in that department. Separate his features from their association with goonish comedy roles in the Carry On series and they start to seem surprisingly appropriate too. Bresslaw was soon to appear in Blood of the Vampire, written by Jimmy Sangster, and he was certainly no stranger to Hammer, for whom he appeared on a number of occasions, most notably as a comic Jekyll and Hyde in The Ugly Duckling.
But still, how strange to speculate on what might have happened - both to Bresslaw's career and to Lee's - if the original casting had prevailed! Might Bresslaw have become an international horror star? Probably not - he could never have played Dracula.
.
Then there are all those unrealised projects, the famous posters for movies that were never made: Victim of His Imagination, Nessie, Vampirella or of course my personal favourite, Zeppelin Vs Pterodactyls. And imagine if The Hound of the Baskervilles had rung the box office bell a little more resoundingly, and Hammer had responded with a whole series of richly coloured, horror-tinged Sherlock Holmes movies. That, surely, is a prospect to savour: imagine Hammer’s take on The Speckled Band, The Devil’s Foot, The Sussex Vampire, The Creeping Man...
This what-if game can get mighty infectious!
.
Returning to Blood From the Mummy's Tomb, though, I can't help thinking that we can justifiably curse the fact that Valerie Leon's was a one-shot performance for the company, and in particular that she was never cast as a vampiress.
Critical consensus has never been too effusive about her performance in Blood, but time has rightly made an icon of her all the same. None of the studio's other starlets was so genuinely spooky, so weirdly sensual and ethereal, an effect accentuated by her transfixing eyes and eerily melodious voice.
I don't know and will never understand why her performance is so consistently underrated, or how it didn't lead to other starring roles for the studio (or, indeed, any studio: it's her only ever movie lead). How did she never get to play a vampire? Think of her in Adrienne Corri's role in Vampire Circus, Anoushka Hempel's in Scars of Dracula, even, dare I say it, Martine Beswick's in Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde? Leon had a very special quality that was tailor-made for horror films, that went far deeper than mere gorgeousness and physical majesty, the only attributes that were tapped in her more frequent appearances in British comedies.
.
But the Hammer what if my imagination grapples with most often is one that was all set to become reality, and yet remains almost completely unimaginable: Lust For a Vampire directed by Terence Fisher.
The first, Bray-era classics with which Fisher's name is synonymous seem a world away from the later, more brazenly exploitational films of the studio’s final decade, of which Lust For a Vampire is so emblematic. It's hard placing Terence Fisher and Yutte Stensgaard in the same universe - the idea of them collaborating on the same film is just ridiculous.
And yet, but for a twist of fate, not only would the film have starred Cushing in Ralph Bates’s pervy headmaster role, but it would indeed have been directed by Fisher, who was signed and ready before being forced to pull out after breaking his leg in a traffic accident.
I just can't begin to imagine how the film might differ with Fisher at the helm, what he would have chosen to play up or play down, how he would have handled the script's emphasis on softcore eroticism, if he would have attempted to reign in some of its more absurd or excessive contrivances or just rolled with them, and what his working relationship with Fine and Style would have been.
I don't have many bad words to say about Lust as it exists: it seems to me one of the most unfairly maligned of the later Hammers. But still, Fisher's version is one I'd give anything to see, and an unfortunate loss to the studio's filmography.
.Ready when you are, Mr Fisher...
.
What unrealised Hammer projects most excite your imagination? If any readers would like to submit their own favourite what ifs and if onlys in the comments, please do so!

2 new Hammer events

Courtesy of the Yahoo Hammer group comes news of two interesting Hammer related events in the near future:

It looks like Don Fearney is going ahead with yet another one of his outstanding Hammer meet ups in the Cine Lumiere in London. On July 25 he will stage a John Carson tribute with a Q&A and showings of some of Carson's movie. It is likely that this will include a cinematic appearance of Plague of the Zombies that starred Carson as the evil squire. Tickets will be £25. More details about this when I have them, but Don's events are always a lot of fun (just check here and here for some examples) and an opportunity to meet up with a number of Hammer stars and indeed Hammer fans.

Valerie Leon is also planning a one-woman show about her film career aptly titled Valerie Leon's Carry On. The show will be staged on March 19 in St Albans and on March 21 in East Grinstead. The latter event also includes a gourmet meal presumably with Ms Leon in attendance as well. More details can be found on her website. A visit to her website will also reveal a little clip of recent projects that she was involved in. Looks like she is definitely keeping busy.

Crumpet

A good while ago the BBC showed a documentary called CRUMPET about "a very British sex symbol". I was annoyed with myself that I didn't find a way to tape it the time it was on as this was a really fun little piece with some of my favourite actresses including of course lots of Hammer Glamour eye candy and also included interviews with them.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see some extracts posted on YouTube.

Enjoy!!!