Vincent Van Lynn plays Eric, a hypnotist / magician who's fallen on hard times. He's now eager to find something novel to exploit, some new way of separating suckers from their hard earned cash. Inspired by TV preachers, he decides to become the leader of a love cult. His motto is that a religion should "have a good payoff", and realizes that sex is one of the unifying, universal desires of human beings. He re-christens himself "Brother Eros", and his love cult becomes successful, but trouble brews in a couple of ways. His "employees" demand a bigger piece of the action, and Mrs. Blakesley, a filthy rich nymphomaniac, bewitches him when she offers up one of her country homes as a house of love.
Director Barry Mahon made a LOT of exploitation titles during his career; here he directs under the name "T.A. Dee", which is a pretty silly and obvious pseudonym. Conceived by Forest Russell, "The Love Cult" is intriguing to a point, and it gets off to a good start with its opening titles. Its main problem is that nothing much ever happens. It does deliver sex and nudity for the target audience, and shows how things can progress towards violence when people are properly provoked. For a 66 minute long movie, though, it is rather slow and overly talky. It does get by thanks to a forceful performance by Van Lynn, who later appeared in bigger movies like "Marooned" and "Fuzz". The black & white photography and the music are reasonably effective. The highly unnecessary narration is frequently ridiculous and often very funny.
It does have to be debited, though, for a distasteful resolution for its female characters.
Five out of 10.
