All but one of these Jekyll and Hyde films will go in the appendix

As I’ve mentioned before, working on any movie book involves catching a lot of “Well, that doesn’t quite fit” films. This week almost all the Jekyll and Hyde movies were like that.

MAD MONSTER PARTY? (1968) — is a Rankin-Bass puppet show in which Baron Frankenstein (Boris Karloff) invents the ultimate destructive formula; feeling he’s now mastered both creation and destruction he calls in the great monsters to announce he’s retiring as their leader and appointing his nephew Felix as the new top dog. Many of the monsters, however, are not down with this … Jekyll and Hyde appear in a few scenes, which is noteworthy — everyone else except a climactic guest star is one of Universal’s creatures (reflecting, I’m guessing, that Universal released its films to TV in the 1950s so kids would be familiar with them). And despite being present-day, Hyde wears the usual top hat and cape. Comedian Phyliss Diller voices the Bride of Frankenstein. “Don’t thank me, thank my pills!”

I caught ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS MEET THE WOLFMAN (2000) on a friend’s recommendation, but while it does indeed have Jekyll and Hyde, it’s in the form of a school play the ‘munks are working on while monster-mad Alvin worries whether neighbor Laurence Talbot (Maurice LaMarche) is a werewolf. As this has Theodore apparently gaining confidence from tapping his Inner Hyde for the role, I thought it might rise above the fringe category of Ensign Pulver until it turns out it’s Talbot’s werewolf bite that’s making Theodore change (Talbot was Lon Chaney Jr.’s role in the classic The Wolf Man). “The school district took out a bond to buy insurance against Alvin blowing things up.”

Despite the title, the Italian comedy MY FRIEND, DR. JEKYLL (1960) has nothing to do with Stevenson’s classic. Instead it involves an ugly mad doctor arranging to swap minds with a professor at a women’s school in order to get a little action; the Jekyll/Hyde element only comes up when the professor’s behavior has people worrying he’s getting a split personality.An uninspired comedy with a few funny moments (mostly the bewildered professor trying to figure out, Hangover-style, what kind of madness he’s embroiled in each time he wakes up). “Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t you trust my genius?”

SANTO IN THE WAX MUSEUM (1963) has the legendary Mexican luchador investigating a series of disappearances which turn out to be the work of a mad, scarred wax-museum director who’s using real people coated in wax for his figures (it’s a knockoff of House of Wax). I assumed that the Hyde and other monster figures on exhibit would come to life to battle Santo but nope — I doubt this will make the appendix, even. “Friends are a scarce luxury — I admit I am very sorry to have to treat you as a victim now.”

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