What’s the weirdest movie you’ve ever watched?
Toomorrow (1970), written and directed by Val Guest and starring, amongst others, a young Olivia Newton-John.
It’s quite possibly the most bonkers film I’ve ever watched. A science-fiction musical comedy so dreadful that it becomes brilliant.
Imagine an especially deranged episode of the original Star Trek, crossed with The Monkees, a psychedelic pop video and a particularly bad school revue.
The premise? An alien civilisation is in desperate need of a particular kind of sound vibration to survive. And where, in the entire universe, do they find it? In the music of an obscure British pop group called Toomorrow, featuring Olivia Newton-John, who are promptly abducted by extraterrestrials to save their civilisation.
Of course they are!
The film was intended to launch a pop sensation, with James Bond producer Harry Saltzman and music impresario Don Kirshner behind it. Instead, it became a spectacular disaster. Released briefly in 1970, it was withdrawn after just a week following a legal dispute over unpaid fees and effectively disappeared for decades.
Which somehow makes it even better.
Everything about it is gloriously wrong. The dialogue, the performances, the special effects, the music, the extraordinary conviction with which everyone appears to embrace this completely preposterous enterprise.
And yet I loved it.
There’s something irresistible about a film that takes such an utterly ridiculous idea and pursues it with such enthusiasm. It belongs to that peculiar category of cinematic disasters that are infinitely more entertaining than many technically accomplished, entirely forgettable films.
It’s dreadful. It’s brilliant. It’s Toomorrow.
And if the aliens ever return looking for the perfect sound to save their civilisation, I suggest we introduce them to David Bowie.
I watched a restored version on the BFI channel.
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