Things To Come is a very obscure 1976 softcore sex science fiction film which has been released by the American Genre Film Archive (paired with The Dirty Dolls) in their Smut Without Smut series on Blu-Ray.
Smut Without Smut may be the most senseless idea in the history of home video. The idea was to take X-Rated movies and chop out all the X-Rated bits. I know, it’s a bit like taking comedy movies and chopping out all the jokes. I did get the impression from the commentary track by the AGFA team that there was a bit of an ideological agenda behind the Smut Without Smut project.
They did at least show some faint glimmerings of intelligence by including the uncut versions on the Blu-Ray as well.
I watched the uncut version so that’s the version I’m reviewing. Having also sat through the irritating audio commentary to the non-naughty version I can say that I’ve seen both versions.
OK, back to the movie. This is a story that takes place in a dystopian future. It’s a soft totalitarianism in which the population is controlled by television. So it’s basically the world we have now but with TV rather than the internet as the method of social control. The TV shows endless sex and violence because that calms people down.
One thing that is interesting is that the movie doesn’t get ideological. It doesn’t have an actual ideological axe to grind. The subject is social control by means of technology. What the ideological purpose behind the social control might be is never specified because it’s irrelevant.
Julie (Barbara Fisk) is the heroine and she’s dissatisfied by her marriage. Her husband just watches TV all day.
Julie is involved with a terrorist group who plan to blow up the government’s super-computer.
Julie wins the lottery. The prize is a week in the Pleasure Dome, where every fantasy can be lived out. The idea is obviously lifted from Westworld.
Julie doesn’t have much fun. The leisure activities are much too violent for her. These include killer-cross – moto-cross but with motorcycle riders hunting down female victims. Once it’s explained to her that the victims are just robots it doesn’t bother her so much. And when she later kills a security guard she feels no qualms about it at all. He was just a robot. A machine.
Of course the Pleasure Dome turns out to be not quite what it appears to be.
There are obvious borrowings from various other science fiction movies and TV series (such as Death Race 2000 and Nigel Kneale’s superb TV play Year of the Sex Olympics).
The plot might not be dazzlingly original but it’s perfectly serviceable and while the ending might not come as a huge surprise it’s effective enough.
OK, back to the smut. The X-Rated material is very mild simulated sex plus a lot of nudity. Yes, there is a lot of frontal nudity. If you’re terrified of the female body maybe you should play safe and just stick to children’s cartoons. There does seem to be some doubt about the original intentions of the filmmakers, as to whether some of the softcore material was added later, and whether the filmmakers approved or disapproved of this.
I think the movie makes much less sense without the softcore stuff. The sex stuff makes it clearer that this is a society in which sex and violence are used as social pacifiers. The scene with Julie and her husband watching TV has a lot more impact when we see the sex stuff on the TV. It makes the couple’s reactions a lot more interesting. There’s a very early scene which apparently had the AGFA team heading for the fainting couches. In fact it works really well. The sudden twist in which the poor innocent victim reveals that she’s just an actress and she’s treated the whole thing as a joke helps to make the point of the movie and adds an interesting multiple voyeurism – we’re watching a couple who are watching something but what they’re watching is not what it seems to be. And the viewer is immediately drawn into the voyeurism.
Very little is known about this movie. No-one knows anything about the producer-director, Derek Ford, or the writer, Michael Greenwood. It seems to have been financed by some guys with a background in hardcore. It’s impossible to say whether Ford knew the extra sex stuff was going to be added. When you watch the non-naughty Smut Without Smut version what you have is at best a cheap knock-off of a number of well-known sci-fi movies. I imagine that it was obvious that it was unreleasable. It’s not terrible but it’s just not interesting enough to have worked as a serious art film at the time, and it’s too tame to have succeeded as an exploitation movie. The decision to add the extra sex footage was quite sensible. It turned it into an intriguing exploration of social control through vicarious artificial pleasures. Rather than just being a cheapo Westworld it becomes an interesting riff on Huxley’s Brave New World.
And regarded in that light it’s not too bad. The ideas might not be original but they’re good ideas, and they might not be explored in profound depth but they are explored. I enjoyed it more than I expected to and it’s worth a recommend rating.
What’s interesting is that for decades this was thought be be a lost movie, until AGFA discovered they had had a complete print (in fairly good condition) sitting in their archive.
