Love Pill, The (1972)

The population of the small village of Buggley hasn’t risen for six years, and statisticians at the Ministry of Health want to know why.

Professor Edwards (Kenneth Waller) investigates and finds that all the village women are buying pom-pom-like sweets from the village store. As well as acting as an instant contraceptive, the sugar balls also have aphrodisiac qualities, essentially turning all the female villagers into nymphomaniacs.

When his father and Professor Edwards are accidentally shot and killed by a hunter, the shop owner Arnold Crudley (David Pugh) – picture Ronnie Corbett’s taller, older brother – is persuaded by the professor’s secretary, Linda (Melinda Churcher), to market his product in the form of a pill and he leaves the village with her to seek his fortune in London.

The fish out of water is easily shocked by the permissive attitude of 1970’s London, represented by topless waitresses and Linda sharing her flat with Arnold and walking around it naked – which has the country boy cowering in fear.

Arnold falls in with a cartoonish con man called Libido (Henry Woolf) and his secretary, Sylvia (Toni Sinclair), and the pills – rechristened ‘Libido specials’ – are soon being manufactured in a laboratory and flying off the shelves. No man is safe!

Cue scenes of men (most of who seem to have buck teeth, Coke bottle glasses and country bumpkin accents) being attacked and molested on London streets by over-lustful women and a Mary Whitehouse proxy (Mary Tighthouse, played by Tilly Tremayne) being turned from moral reformer to sex maniac on national television.

Disaster ultimately follows when the root, which is the main ingredient of the pill, can no longer be found.

Libido’s office is stormed by hordes of angry women – now pregnant – and a mad chase ensues in which Libido loses all his money and runs – penniless – off into the sunset.

This woeful British sex comedy is neither sexy nor funny.

Aimlessly drifting from one unfunny sketch to the next (because the plot is paper thin), the film is padded out with some rather pointless parodies of popular TV ads of the day – The Heinz Baked Beans jingle gets a makeover here as “a million housewives every day, open a bottle of pills today.”

While shooting the film in Finchingfield, Essex, the producers told the villagers they were making a serious BBC documentary.

Arnold Crudley
David Pugh
Libido
Henry Woolf
Linda 
Melinda Churcher
Sylvia
Toni Sinclair
Professor Edwards
Kenneth Waller
Newsreader
John Stratton
Mary Tighthouse
Tilly Tremayne
Lady Feellitt
Jackie Andrews

Director
Ken Turner