Robert Aldrich satirizes the gross disparity between real life and bland television "realism" in The Killing of Sister George, which falls somewhere between The Big Knife and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane in his parade of human gargoyles. On the set of the BBC's "Applehurst," the kindly, meddlesome Sister George pedals about on a motor bike bringing health and goodwill to the denizens of a small English village. Off the set, things are not so cheery. Grotesque parody is the only spirit in which we can take the sado-masochistic living-room divertissements of the aging actress, June "Sister George" Buckridge (Beryl Reid) and her baby-doll lover (Susannah York): their antics are invariably played out in front of the TV set, and in the bedroom we are made the voyeurs. The film unfortunately wavers between the satiric and the genuinely grand guignol, often making the lesbian lovers the freakshow. But it is at its best when Aldrich allows June Buckridge to know what he knows: her send-ups of the straight world are hilarious; her Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship with her TV self, bizarre and mocking; her discovery that Sister George will soon be flattened by a lorry-on TV, where "even the coffin is a fake"-bitter. (JB)