Olivia Newton-John sings for aliens in Toomorrow

Director: Val Guest
Tagline: “Launch out on a musical cosmic trip with the new ‘Tomorrow’”
Choice IMDB keywords: Alien, band, cult, outer space, musician, independent film
Plot: Toomorrow opens, as all pop-rock musicals should, with a cheap-looking spaceship hurtling through the cosmos while a young Olivia Newton-John croons a sugary ditty for a soundtrack that is the film’s sole reason for existing. The film and the band of the same name were conceived by pop-culture maestro Don Kirshner as part of a naked attempt to create another pre-fabricated multimedia pop phenomenon like The Monkees and The Archies, both of whom Kirshner helped shape. Those ventures helped earned him the nickname “The Man With The Golden Ear,” but neither Toomorrow the film nor Toomorrow the band fared nearly as well. The film took two years to make but played London for only a week in its initial release, and legend holds that an embarrassed Kirshner insisted the film could only be released on home video after his death.
It’s easy to see why Toomorrow filled Kirshner with shame. The film is a singularly unpalatable, incoherent juxtaposition of Monkees-style faux-countercultural musical-comedy shenanigans, sitcom idiocy, instantly dated campus political activism, and creaky science fiction from people whose understanding of the genre seemed to begin and end with a vague sense that it maybe involved spaceships and aliens or something. The plot concerns a dying, emotionless alien race that can only be saved by the music of an unknown British pop group headlined by a pre-fame Newton-John. Said band is populated by such stock types as a black drummer (Karl Chambers) who communicates solely via a doddering old white screenwriter’s approximation of contemporary jive talk (writer-director Val Guest was 59 when the film was just barely released); a scheming womanizer (Ben Thomas); and a foppish lad (Vic Cooper) whose sole defining characteristic, beyond playing a newfangled synthesizer-like instrument whose vibrations prove key to the alien race’s survival, is his devotion to his ballerina girlfriend and desire to properly celebrate her birthday.
Toomorrow is unaware of the central role its forgettable pop-rock will play in saving an emotionless alien race, so the group carries on obliviously, throwing itself into a campus sit-in and an upcoming gig at a rock festival, which the film inexplicably gives equal weight to the whole “saving an alien race through music” plot. Kirshner set out to make a music-and-spectacle-filled science-fiction rock musical, but not at the expense of scintillating subplots involving campus politics and the birthday of Cooper’s girlfriend.
In time, however, Toomorrow is beamed up into the alien spaceship and told about its messianic role. But the group can’t just rock out for a bunch of stiff alien squares. It’s gotta feel the vibe to make the magic happen, and that can only happen in front of a crowd that’s feeling the band’s groove. So the aliens beam Toomorrow back to Earth with the understanding that during the climax of the group’s performance at a festival that very night, the aliens will beam the entire band and crowd up into their spaceship so that the alchemy between Toomorrow and their fans will provide enough emotion and heart to save their race.
Upon returning to Earth, the members of Toomorrow all but forget about the fact that they were kidnapped by aliens. Why obsess about such things when there’s a sit-in, a rock show, and a girlfriend’s birthday to occupy them? That stuff’s just a little more important than alien abduction or the fate of a distant race. Nonetheless, Toomorrow ends up playing the climactic gig, at which point the group is, according to plan, beamed up into the spaceship along with an ecstatic crowd overjoyed at being able to experience the magic of Toomorrow. Or are they? What if it was all just Newton-John’s dream? A pointless, pointless dream?
Key scenes: What appears to be a bored British gentleman (veteran British character actor Roy Dotrice) gets up out of bed, yawns, checks his watch, then sleepily wanders over to his front yard, where he meanders into a beam that transports his pajama-clad self into a spaceship whose gaudy interior and exterior look like a cross between Superman’s Fortress Of Solitude and a radioactive jewelry box. Dotrice then disinterestedly takes off his pajama top before removing his head and human skin to reveal he is an alien. Dotrice gives his superior the same report he has delivered for the 3,000 years he’s been indifferently observing humanity and its peculiar customs: “There is still nothing to report. Not one original element, not one interesting deviant. Merely an abortive attempt at evolution. Venus all over again.” Me-ow! Dotrice’s dim take on homo sapiens makes him the bitchy Mr. Blackwell of intergalactic alien observers.