Baby Love (1969)

Luci, she is a slutty 15 year old English schoolgirl who comes home one day from school to find her Mum as dead as a door knob in the tub. You see her Mum has cut her wrists. Fortunately for Luci, her Mum's childhood friend is now a very successful upper-middle class doctor who has decided to take Luci home to his family (on a trial basis). And the seduction begins.It's a very slow and boring movie, but apparently some reviewers really get off on seeing an underage girl involved in these shenanigans. -- including stripping. I don't.I watched this mostly because I wanted to see Diana Dors who oddly is in the film for 2 seconds and has no lines!The underage girl went on to doing some Hammer horror movies and sex romp films.If you saw Pretty Poison, you know the plot of this movie. They are roughly the same film, only Dew Barrymore isn't as attractive.Frankly, I would have rather seen Taste the Blood of Dracula than this one.

This nifty, late-60's British thriller is about a scheming teenage girl (Linda Hayden) who after her mother's suicide moves in with the family of her mother's married lover and proceeds to seduce all three of them (father, mother, teenage son)--two of whom may be blood relatives! If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because it was the subject of an uncredited, near-remake by Hollywood in the early 1990's called "Poison Ivy", which spawned three increasingly trashy sequels and revived the career of Drew Barrymore. Hayden is actually much better here than Barrymore was in "Poison Ivy", but this movie is very hard to find today, no doubt because Hayden has several brief nude scenes and was about the same age at the time as her fifteen-year-old character. This is monumentally silly more than forty years later--half the adult population (women) have seen a girl that age naked, and the other half (let's just be honest here) probably have at some point in their lives. But we live in a society today where if a teenage girl sends nude photos of herself to her teenage boyfriend, instead of considering it a "teachable moment", we're more likely to charge them both with distributing child pornography! Anyway, whatever else she was, Linda Hayden was a criminally underrated actress. She got some attention for her appearances in Hammer's "Taste the Blood of Dracula" and as another sexy, evil vixen in "Blood on Satan's Claw" (where, incidentally, she has even more graphic and still-underage nude scenes as well). She had more bad luck after that though. She reunited with the director here (Alistair Reid) as well Peter Finch and Shelly Winters in another very solid thriller called "Something to Hide" that has been all hacked up and never released on DVD for no good reason I can tell. Her best performance perhaps though was in "The House on Straw Hill" (which makes it's likely inspiration, Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs", look like a Disney film), but that entertaining but uber-sleazy venture became the only British-made film to be labeled a "video nasty" in Britain and it was banned there for many years. As a somewhat ironic result, it's considered a minor cult film there today(and was even remade in 2009), but was little seen outside of the UK. As for Hayden, she eventually took her considerable charms to dumb British sex comedies like the "Confessions of" series and "Queen Kong" (starring her then paramour Robin Askwith) before ending her career with a cameo role (mostly nude, of course) in "The Boys of Brazil".There's nothing much to say about the rest of the cast as this is Linda Hayden's show all the way. But there is a good cameo at the beginning by ill-fated, former glamor actress Diana Dors as the Hayden character's mother. As for the director, Alistair Reid, he's no doubt now written off as a "dirty old man" in some quarters for having directed this, but his "Something to Hide" and "Deadly Strangers" (with Hayley Mills and Sterling Hayden)were equally good British thrillers. I'd certainly recommend this.

Perhaps this British movie from the late 60s has virtues that were hidden from me. I didn't think much of it. (My opinion may have been tainted by the sleazy transfer to DVD.) It's the story of Luci, a fifteen-year-old girl whose mother has just committed suicide and who is taken in by her mother's former beau and his family -- a nice wife and a goggle-eyed adolescent boy.It's a pretty nice house and a comfortable place, though the father is uptight and snarls a lot. Luci exploits all the family members by suggesting she's sexually available, although there isn't a lot of nudity or simulated coitus. What it is, is a set up for a pornographic movie, but without the skin, just the rather ordinary plot. In skin flicks, a plot like this would be used as a device to hinge together the varied couplings. In an underground skin flick they'd have introduced the family mule or something. They'd bring in the chauffeur and the idiot son who is kept in the attic. Here, without the couplings, it's just dull.And it's not simply that the plot isn't exactly gripping. The only talent visible on the screen is that of Luci's adopted mother, who gives a seasoned performance. Luci herself -- that is, Linda Hayden -- could have been replaced by any reasonably good-looking kid who had stood out from the crowd in her high school plays. The editing is pretty clumsy too. Luci is groped by a neighbor in the local cinema but the camera doesn't seem to know how to handle the situation any better than the heroine. The cuts are confusing and Luci's response is a blank.It's not a terrible movie -- not a fell insult to anyone's sensibilities. It's just cheap and rudely made. A little more gratuitous nudity would have helped. However, others have apparently got more out of it than I did.

Warning: Explicit nudity, lesbianism and all-around bad behavior make this a very poor choice for showing your kids or your 80 year-old mother.Wow. This is one sleazy movie and it's a shame, as a really good film seemed like it was hiding within and could have resulted had the direction and script been a little more clever and a little less sensationalistic. The disturbed relationships of all concerned did have the possibility of making a fine film.The movie starts with a middle-aged woman (Diana Dors) committing suicide. Her 15 year-old daughter inexplicably goes to live with her old lover and his new family. This really doesn't make much sense--you'd think there'd be SOMEONE related to her or a foster home instead of this person who she'd never even met. This is very contrived, but so be it. Once in this home, you are never sure how much this girl connives or just happens to fall into bizarre sexual relationships with the son, wife and tries desperately to have sex with the father!! In many ways, she appears to seek emotional love and support in the only way she understood--with her body. All in all, a surprisingly dark and twisted series of events that is rather hard to believe--especially in the end of the film when she is revealed to be a bit less naive than in the rest of the film.Sadly, had this movie taken more of the high road it actually could have been quite challenging but good entertainment. The Freudian aspects as well as as the idea of a sick family whose dynamics are thrown for a loop with the introduction of this troubled teen is fascinating. Think about it--because of their own inadequacies and unfulfilling relationships they each, in turn, seek it out in the girl. This could have been an interesting film that was less exploitation and more psychological. But, instead with glimpses here and there of the girl's body and lots of innuendo, the film just seemed more like soft-core porn than anything else.By the way, the 15 year-old in the film really was 15--making you feel, perhaps, a bit dirty for watching it. I just assumed she was of consenting age and was surprised when I looked it up on IMDb to see that somehow they got away with making a skin flick with an underage girl. That's rather sad.