It can be a many-splendored thing. Optimists insist that it's sweeping the country. According to the Beatles, it's "all you need." Two new movies, however, give love such a mauling that it emerges bruised and battered, in an all but unrecognizable state.
The Love Bug is the Walt Disney organization's whimsical tribute to the Volkswagen. The little thing gets a crush on a down-and-out racing driver (Dean Jones) and follows him home. Jones spurns the smitten vehicle until he discovers that it has a mind of its own. The bug, it seems, is just about the fastest thing on four wheels and is fairly dropping its transmission to give Jones a ride to fame and fortune. The glory road, however, is constantly being rerouted by a swishy villain (David Tomlinson), who is determined to seize the wondrous bug and turn it into scrap.
The outcome of all this is about as predictable as the benumbing succession of autopomorphic gags. Connoisseurs of camp may enjoy watching Tomlinson ranting at the Volkswagen, but The Love Bug is surely the first film in which the actors (Jones, Michele Lee, Buddy Hackett) are so meticulously insipid that a car can handily steal the show.
Baby Love is a tacky little enterprise about a scheming English teen-ager named Luci (Linda Hayden). An unhappy and uninteresting hybrid of Lilith and Lolita, Luci is first seen putting on an exhibition of osculation for her delighted classmates, and things deteriorate—rather rapidly—from there. She comes home from school one day to discover that Mum (Diana Dors) has done herself in. Luci goes off to stay with one of Mum's old lovers (Keith Barren), a successful doctor whose opulent standard of living suggests that socialized medicine in Britain has not put much of a dent in private income.
Sooner than anyone can say nymphet, Luci has infected the doctor's entire household: Mom (Ann Lynn) gives in to her latent lesbianism. Junior (Derek Lamden) develops insatiable lechery, and the good doctor himself breaks out in cold sweats over Luci's miniskirts. Director Alastair Reid uses lots of nervous zoom shots and enormous close-ups that suggest the influence of Roman Polanski in every area except talent. Although Baby Love offers a little something for everybody—voyeurism, nymphomania, homosexuality, sadism—it does not really have enough of any one to appeal to anyone.