EDGE OF SANITY
"Hyde...Jack Hyde."

Frozen hamburger patties are always circular, but when they're cooked they become elliptical.  I don't get it.

  Poor Dr. Jekyll.  Not only was he spanked as a child (the horror!), but his research monkey knocks over some chemicals, he inhales the fumes (the monkey, however, seems fine) and next thing you know, he's all covered in fright makeup and overacting outrageously.  His name now is Jack Hyde, and whaddya know - he's feeling Saucy.

  Yessir, this particular adaptation of Stevenson's novella makes Mr. Hyde into Jack The Ripper, which is actually kinda neat, although I have no idea how much this fits in with history or the original novella, which I own but STILL haven't read because, well, I'm lazy. 

  This blending of mythologies is a rather uneasy one - really, the Jekyll/Hyde thing seems so tacked-on it's like an afterthought.  A straight Ripper flick might have worked better here, and served to have reined in Perkins' overacting.  But it's nice to see Jack portrayed as, for once, not wearing a cape and top hat.

  Perkins is way over the top and far too silly to take seriously here; the script doesn't help him, leaving me to wonder if the term "No holds barred" was in use in Victorian England.  That makeup job is no asset either, rendering Hyde to look like one of the zombies from Dawn Of The Dead.  I understand that prostitution is a business and businesses demand customers, but man, I'd have to be pretty desperate for a crack fix before I'd start coming on to a guy looking like this like these girls do.

  Directed by Gerard Kikoine, a porno director who went "legit" (comparatively, with movies like this and the crapwagon Buried Alive) ("crapwagon", as regular readers can see, is my favorite word for the month) for a little while before just kinda stopping in 1990.  My favorite shot has to be this one unintentionally hilarious shot of a prostitute, bent over, with fog/smoke/steam/whatever roiling out in the background, camera clumsily placed so that it appears to be coming from her ass in one long, streaming fart.

  Not exactly a topnotch adaptation of either the Jekyll/Hyde thing nor the story of Jack the Ripper.  Instead, go watch...oh, just pick something at random.

BACK TO MAIN PAGE BACK TO THE E's