Watching this genuinely feels like unearthing a lost cinematic artefact buried beneath decades of dust, litigation and cultural confusion. Conceived as a more ‘grown up’ British answer to The Monkees by music impresario Don Kirshner and Bond’s Harry Saltzman, this gloriously strange sci-fi musical effectively vanished after its 1970 premiere when director Val Guest successfully sought an injunction against Saltzman over unpaid salary. This left the film essentially locked away for almost forty years, slowly mutating into cult-movie folklore.So what exactly were audiences deprived of all this time? The ultimate lost cult classic? A desperate corporate attempt to manufacture ‘hip youth culture’ by middle-aged executives who had clearly never knowingly encountered an actual young person? A cosmic acid trip where the descendants of Bill and Ted somehow wandered into a Benny Hill sketch written by people who had only vaguely heard about the sexual revolution through newspaper headlines?The answer is all of the above. And more. And less…Roy Dotrice is an intergalactic envoy on earth, marooned here for thousands of years with nothing really going on of any interest for him or his space chums. Until one far out and groovy band – Toomorrow - begin to produce music that give out just the right frequencies to save the cultural malaise of his own species, who have resorted to using computers to make desperately unsatisfying 'music'. Spirited away, the band want no part of helping save an entire species, they just want to play their eight-minute slot at the Roundhouse that night but first have to navigate endless waves of mildly horny student-life shenanigans…Notably serving as the screen debut for Olivia Newton-John, Toomorrow often feels less like a conventional film and more like an artefact from an alternate universe where every aspect of late-60s pop culture was fed into a malfunctioning computer and spat back out in increasingly bizarre combinations. There are moments where it resembles a children’s television programme made by people actively experimenting with hallucinogens; others where it feels like an ultra-sanitised attempt to bottle the ‘free love’ era for audiences who still thought exposed knees constituted dangerous eroticism.And yet it’s all very weirdly charming.The songs themselves are genuinely catchy, with several musical numbers possessing that bright, relentlessly optimistic bubblegum energy that defined the era. Newton-John already radiates the effortless warmth and charisma that would later turn her into a global superstar, even if much of her screentime here consists of harmonising in the background and making tea while chaos unfolds around her.But surrounding the music is a film so nakedly cynical in conception, you can practically feel the corporate brainstorming sessions sweating through every frame: middle-aged executives desperately trying to engineer ‘youth appeal’ through carefully controlled doses of psychedelia, student politics and sexual liberation without ever actually becoming remotely threatening, political or genuinely transgressive. And the result is hilariously square.The film’s supposedly risqué material - featuring the very attractive likes of Margaret Nolan, Imogen Hassall and Tracey Crisp - feels less scandalous than an especially lively knitting circle. The student activism is so timid and non-committal it borders on parody, wanting desperately to appear ‘right on’ while carefully avoiding any actual social commentary. Even the band itself, despite being notably multicultural and mixed-gender for the period, possess so little believable chemistry that convincing us they are the musical saviours of an alien civilisation becomes a genuinely heroic ask.But bafflingly, its all so compulsively watchable. It’s the kind of film that could only have emerged from that brief late-60s/early-70s moment when pop culture, psychedelia, science fiction and corporate commercialism all collided headfirst into one another without anybody really understanding where the boundaries were anymore. And while the end result doesn’t entirely work as narrative, satire, musical or sci-fi adventure, it does as a deeply strange time capsule from a cultural moment desperately trying to reinvent itself.Quite completely bananas. And oddly kinda wonderful because of it.
