Hyping Dr. Jekyll’s dungeon of death!

DR. JEKYLL’S DUNGEON OF DEATH (1980) has yet another descendant of Dr. Jekyll (James Mathers) doing evil experiments — though as he points out in the opening narration, unlike his ancestor he’s not fool enough to experiment on himself. Instead he has his brute man assistant, Boris, kidnap people off the streets for testing in his basement.

As he explains at one point, he’s successfully developed a better strain of beef cattle but the bulls are sexless drones who refuse to breed the next generation. He tried adapting his great-grandfather’s formula to unleash their lust, which worked — except that the bulls then killed the cows after mating. He’s been testing on people to see if he can neutralize the aggression — but watching his victims battle in the “dungeon of death,” he’s starting to think creating an army of psycho soldiers would be more lucrative, if he can just refine his control.

This would be a serviceable story, and the fight scenes are good (the producer got actual karate-trained fighters) but too much of the film is creepily misogynistic: Jekyll has his dream girl tied up and drugged for raping (“I want to hear you scream.”) and abuses his mute sister, having already lobotomized her to stop her opposing him. He’s also involved in some elaborate revenge scheme … but we never learn exactly what. Overall, this low-budget entry is not a winner. “Good god, Jekyll, does tragedy follow you everywhere?”

DR. HECKYL AND MR.HYPE (1980) stars Oliver Reed as a deformed podiatrist — think the Fredric March atavistic Mr. Hyde but with Hulk’s skin tone — depressed nobody will ever love him, oblivious that his patients, colleagues and employees are all fond of him. When he takes a friend’s experimental weight loss drug with an eye to drinking enough to kill himself, he discovers, instead, that it’s stripped away the deformities to make him handsome Oliver Reed. Now women are happy to go to bed with him — but at the first hint he’s not their romantic fantasy, he kills them.

This fits into the Nutty Professor subgenre and much like Eddie Murphy’s Professor Klump I feel as if Reed has the same mind in both bodies — I have no trouble believing in his altered behavior as a plausible reaction to his new form. However the movie asserts it’s the drug — he’s become the person he most wants to be, a handsome ladies man, even though it’s the kind of guy he also despises. That’s not a bad idea, I’m not entirely sure it fits here.

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