The lady’s name is Hyde!

I’ve never been a fan of Sean Young, an actor who was (to me) unaccountably getting A-list roles and good reviews back in the 1980s. For that reason I skipped DR. JEKYLL AND MS. HYDE (1995) when it came out and having watched it now, I can’t say I made a mistake.

Timothy Daley is Dr. Richard Jacks, a biochemist whose big ambitions never materialized, leaving him working at Polly Bergen’s perfume company with obnoxious coworkers such as Harvey Fierstein. He does have his True Love, Sarah (Lysette Anthony) to keep his life good, but he still feels frustrated.

After a relative’s funeral, Richard inherits notebooks from his great-grandfather — Henry Jekyll. He discovers Jekyll identified the genetic root of human evil and sought to suppress it with an estrogen treatment. The assumption that evil stems from male aggression and female hormones can conquer it might make for an interesting movie but here it’s just an excuse for Richard to try and fix the problem with a larger dose of estrogen, turning him into Helen Hyde (Young).

Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde has generated a lot of trans analysis in the years since it came out (something I’ll write about soon) This film has not; indeed it feels like they wrote it to carefully avoid any of the obvious gender issues. Richard has no memory of his time as Helen and she remembers nothing of when she turns back. There’s no suggestion or discussion of why she’s evil or if she’s evil (i.e., if she simply wants to claim her own place in the world—even at the cost of Richard’s existence—is she a monster or just struggling to survive), why the treatment stripped away Richard’s morality. She’s simply a bad girl scheming to undercut her boss. And played by Young, she’s too boring for a villain. “She will witness my entire transformation from man to woman — I think for a man to reveal that to his fiancee is very progressive.”

2003’s DR. JEKYLL AND MISTRESS HYDE is a soft-core erotic film which has more interesting ideas than the above, but does nothing with them. “Jackie Stevenson” (Julian Wells) is a psychiatrist who believes the conflict between women’s lustful and chaste selves makes it impossible for them to get anywhere; by purging one side, she can change that. After testing the drug on a suicidal patient drives her crazy with lust, Jackie tests a modified dose on herself and becomes the sexually liberated Heidi, a lesbian who picks up a teenage hooker and takes her as a mistress.

A female Jekyll and Hyde could do a lot tackling society’s messed-up perception of women’s sexuality, but in this film it’s just an excuse for a lot of lesbian sex scenes. Then we move into the endgame — the two women murdering Jackie’s husband with their help of Paula, a maid he’s been abusing — but the film then throws in a twist that makes zero sense. It doesn’t help that the actors, like so many erotica/porn performers, have this blandly flattened affect that makes their characters feel one-dimensional.

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