By
Hank Reineke
There’s a long-standing Hollywood tradition of blending filmdom’s
most bankable but seemingly disparate genres – horror and comedy – but a
successful marriage of the two is a tricky business at best. The gold standard films of these hybrid would
be, generationally, Abbott & Costello
Meet Frankenstein (1948), Young
Frankenstein (1974) or, I suppose, Ghostbusters
(1984) should one choose to go “modern-contemporary.†Parodies of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would serve as a virtual cottage industry of horror-comedy fusion,
these pastiches encompassing the silent era, animated shorts, features, and
even pornographic films. Having already
challenged the Frankenstein monster, Abbott and Costello would eventually take
on other classic movie monsters, including Boris Karloff’s Mr. Hyde in an
entertaining 1953 Universal Studios production. I like that one a lot.
Charles B. Griffith’s Dr.
Heckyl & Mr. Hype (Cannon Group, 1980) is one of the odder
entries. It’s difficult to exactly pinpoint
this production’s various misfires, but Dr.
Heckyl & Mr. Hype ultimately displays more madness than madcap charm. This brand new release on Blu-ray by Scorpion
Releasing promotes the film as nothing less than a “Long Sought after Cult
Classic,†and I guess it might be… but only if screened before an audience of
undemanding and sleepy stoners attending a midnight movie. It’s a shame really as
there’s a cadre of proven talent both behind and in front of the cameras. Director Charles B. Griffith cut his teeth in
the movie business contributing playfully winking screenplays to low budget
exploitation films for industry maverick Roger Corman. Some of the quickly tossed-off monochrome films
he helped construct – most notably Bucket
of Blood (1959) and Little Shoppe of
Horrors (1960) – would go on to achieve acclaim as true pop culture
classics.
It’s of interest that simultaneous to the 1960 release of
Corman and Griffith’s Little Shoppe of
Horrors to the U.S. drive-in circuit, a little know twenty-two year old
British actor named Oliver Reed would appear, un-credited, in the Hammer
Studios horror film The Two Faces of Dr.
Jekyll (Terence Fisher, 1960). That
Griffith and Reed work together some twenty-years on Dr. Heckyl & Mr. Hype would suggest – on some cosmic level, I
suppose - a neat closing of the circle. But it’s sadly more akin to the tightening of a noose.
Griffith gets sole credit for the film’s screenplay –
although a sub-title acknowledges his “Apologies to Robert Louis Stevenson,â€
the author of the classic 1886 novella “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll &
Mr. Hyde.†Griffith’s script, for all
its faults, does offer an interesting twist on the classic tale… even if that
twist is only a variation of Jerry Lewis’s The
Nutty Professor (1963). Oliver
Reed’s Dr. Henry Heckyl is, unlike the prosperous physician of Stevenson’s
creation, an eccentric podiatrist, one of three doctors (“Heckyl, Hinkle and
Hooâ€) operating out of San Texaco’s quirky Robert A. Coogan Memorial Clinic.
What’s different here is Dr. Heckyl, as he himself admits
forthrightly, possesses a “Face that Spoils a Sunny Day.†Though nattily dressed, he is dreadful in
appearance. His skin is of a green-gray
pallor and spotted with skin lesions, festering sores and ulcerations. His nose
is bulbous and serrated. His teeth are
brown, razor-sharp and crooked, and a bird’s nest of a fright wig sits upon his
hideous noggin. One of his eyes is
completely red, the other completely green. He walks stoop-shouldered and slumbering through his sunny suburban neighborhood,
frightening – or, at the very least - making everyone around him uncomfortable in
his approach. Some look away from him in
sympathy, some in obvious distaste.