Dr Heckyll and Mr Hype (1980)

It has to be said that many films that have slipped into obscurity should probably stay forgotten.  Dr Heckyll and Mr Hype (1980), for instance.  A truly wtf experience which quickly outstays its welcome, it was one of Cannon's earliest productions, following the studio's takeover by Golan and Globus.  They clearly intended it to be a major release - I recall that, during its making, it got a lot of coverage in the UK press, centering around the fact that it was to feature Oliver Reed playing a comedic take on Jekyll and Hyde.  But it never appeared in cinemas and, as far as the UK was concerned, it just seemed to vanish.  What had happened was that Cannon had, upon seeing he completed film, deemed it unreleasable, instead selling it direct to cable TV.  It isn't hard to see why: it is all over the place stylistically and tonally.  Touted as a horror/comedy, it is neither horrific nor comedic enough to qualify as either.  Writer-director Charles b Griffith, a veteran Roger Corman collaborator, clearly thought that he had a ground-breaking concept in giving us an ugly Jekyll character, who turns into a handsome and smooth ladies man.  Except that it had been done before, multiple times, notably in Hammer's 1960 Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, (which, incidentally, had featured Oliver Reed in a supporting role), they repeated the formula in comedic fashion in The Ugly Duckling, with Bernard Bresslaw and, of course, there had been Jerry Lewis' The Nutty Professor.  Unfortunately, Dr Heckyll and Mr Hype doesn't improve upon any of these.

In large part, the problem lies with Oliver Reed's portrayal of the two title characters.  As the ugly, green faced and misshapen podiatrist Dr Heckyll, he actually gives a surprisingly sensitive performance, creating a likeable character who is easy to sympathise with and handles the comic aspects with aplomb.  His Hype, however, is played relatively straight, as a completely narcissistic bastard who ends up murdering the women he tries to seduce when they fail to flatter him sufficiently.  You can see how the murders are meant to be blackly comic, but as performed by Reed, they are simply brutal and unpleasant, contrasting jarringly with the preceding comedy sequences featuring Heckyll and his colleagues at their foot clinic.  Director Griffith laid the blame squarely with Reed, (who hadn't been his choice for the role, but rather that of the producers), claiming that while the actor had been great as Heckyll, he had no idea of how to play Hype, opting simply to play the part as, in essence, himself.  While it is true that Reed's performance in the Hype role does feel like a variation on the sorts of womanising rogues and bastards he had specialised in during the sixties and early seventies, one can't help but feel that, if this wasn't what the film required, surely it was the responsibility of the director to, well, direct him to something more appropriate?  Whatever the truth of the situation, what seems clear watching the finished film is that the script was simply not giving Reed enough to work with in the Hype role.  Certainly, in dialogue terms, it rarely affords him the same kind of comedic opportunities that for Heckyll does.

The film is also stylistically all over the place, with what are supposed to be 'madcap' comedy sequences at the clinic mixed with full on slapstick, (including a bunch of Keystone Cop style policemen chasing Hype around), all interspersed with bouts of violence and Hype going around menacing and murdering women.  At times Griffith seems to be harking back to his Corman days, with the scenes between Heckyll and his police detective patient reminiscent of the dentist sequences in Little Shop of Horrors.  Indeed, the cast includes a couple of veterans of that film in the form of Mel Welles and Dick Miller, both of whom give decent enough performances with the material they are given.  Which goes for the rest of the cast - they try hard, but the laughs just aren't there.  The attempts at comedy are just too scattershot, all too often incidental to the main plot, giving the impression that a lot of it was made up as they went along.  To continue the Corman connection, the production even looks like those early films Griffiths scripted for him, with production values that can best be described as cheap.  Which is a problem when the film was clearly seen by its producers as some kind of prestige production - a vehicle for their 'big name' star Reed.  Dr Heckyll and Mr Hype is one of those films that you watch and can't quite believe what you are seeing, (sadly true of many of Reed's films from this period).  You are left wondering not only just how it was made, but also why?  Reed, to his credit, is smoothly professional, clearly giving it his best shot, the trouble is that the whole thing seems misconceived and a complete waste of his (and everyone else in the cast, for that matter) talents.  

Once again, I have to thank the ever reliable Otherworlds TV for providing an opportunity to see this deservedly forgotten film.