Based on my friend Ross’s recommendation I picked up THE HORROR SPOOFS OF ABBOTT AND COSTELLO: A Critical Assessment of the Comedy Team’s Monster Films by Jeffrey S. Miller (I could have gotten it 20 percent off if I’d realized it was from McFarland). I found his scene-by-scene detailed breakdown of the movies (Meet Frankenstein, Meet the Invisible Man, Meet the Mummy and other genre mashups such as Time of their Lives) tedious, but his analysis is good. How often Costello ends up turning into a monster himself, the implausible frequency with which beautiful women fall for Costello, and other thoughts.
My real interest, of course, was Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and it was worth buying the book to read his thoughts. For example, he points out that in contrast to so many screen Dr. Jekyll’s, Karloff’s is evil even as himself: he’s using his alter ego to kill his enemies while insisting that Hyde’s evil doesn’t taint him; by contrast when Tubby (Costello) gets a shot of the transformation juice, all he does is run around scaring people. He’s not a killer; Jekyll is.
This week’s movies were low-budget and uninteresting. THE MAN WITH 2 HEADS (1971) by low-budget filmmaker Andy Milligan borrows heavily from the March template (like having Hyde’s mistress ask Jekyll for help only to discover that’s a fatal mistake) but with a different rationale. Jekyll hopes dissecting a serial killer’s brain and learning how evil has tainted its brain chemistry will enable him to create an anti-evil vaccine. As he needs human trials to prove his theories and can’t ethically test on another person … well, you can guess the result. The women in the story look like high-school students and the transformation scene has Jekyll staggering through a crowd of smoke with no discernible source. “Have you ever heard of DeSade?”
THE STRANGE CASE OF HYDE AND SEEK (2004) was a thirty-minute short film in which the guests at Jekyll’s house party wonder how peculiar he’s become and remember past arguments such as Utterson fretting because his friend is leaving half his fortune to Hyde (though they don’t mention that name until near the end). This low-budget production might be trying for a steampunk vibe — modern computers, candles for light — or it might just be clumsy and inept; the cast comes off too young (college age at most) to pull this off (Jekyll’s definitely older). The psychobabble about how Jekyll wants to purge us of the damage the media have done to our collective unconscious sounds like there’s a good idea buried somewhere in there but it’s not developed enough to work. “I have no choice but to continue purging myself of the horror with emotional genetic chemistry!”
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