Toomorrow movie review
Cinema Today: By David Gibson
BACK IN the days when this column wore a black leather jacket and motor-cycle boots we used to tear up the seats in the Gaumont when Bill Haley pictures came to town. Little Richard… Fats Domino. Gene Vincent… they all got the VIP treatment to the horror of assorted cinema managers.
But they deserved it, because they had something to offer in those days - a sound, and a theme that something different was happening.
There’s a new film in town next week, at La Scala, Sauchiehall Street, which, is a modern attempt to cash in on all the contemporary equivalents of the things which made the rock films swing.
It’s called “Toomorrow,” after the group which is featured in it. But it’s lacking the basic essential of an exciting sound.
It’s a film for youngsters made by oldsters who are attempting to commercialise everything that’s dear to the teenage heart - and for those reasons, it’s a monumental flop.
The story is basically about a pop group, who live a sort of haphazardly semi-respectable hippie-type life where the blonde vocalist makes everybody’s coffee in the morning and serves it in a shortie nightie while they have their bath.
But she’s so scrubbed-clean you just know she wouldn’t do anything dirty with the coffee mob; they’re all sort of involved with a student protest movement at their art school. But it’s the kind of protest movement that doesn’t want to break anything.
Expensive
Toomorrow are a real pop group - and one of the most expensive groups ever formed. Harry Saltzman, producer of the Bond films, and Don Kirschner, the man who made the Monkees and the Archies, are said to have spent hundreds of thousands promoting them. But they’re going to put Toomorrow into yesterday before they’re even launched.
They have a record out, coincidental with the launch of the film. It’s called “You’re My Baby Now,” and it’s just so much musical fodder.
The only redeeming feature of the film is the fantasy theme running through it, that creatures from outer space like their music and want them Up There and send a bloke to kidnap them.
That makes it light entertainment. But as far as the mass of youngsters it concerned, it’s a load of corn. And phoney corn at that.
The cinema mentioned in this article, La Scala Sauchiehall Street, was in Glasgow, now closed. More details.
Read more about the movie