Who’s the mad science dick who’s a sex machine with all the chicks?

DR. JEKYLL AND LES FEMMES (1981) isn’t the first sleazy or sexploitative film I’ve watched for Jekyll and Hyde (case in point) but it creeped me out the worst, with women’s naked, brutalized corpses displayed as unpleasantly as any slasher film.

Jekyll is throwing a party to announce his engagement but then he turns into Hyde and starts killing, torturing or raping the guests (Hyde has an 11-inch penis, presumably because it’ll tear up lady parts more when it’s that big). In between all that he finds time for an incredibly tedious discussion with his guests about whether Immanuel Kant’s concepts of transcendence are compatible with rational scientific inquiry. With Udo Kier as Jekyll and Patrick Magee as a perverted General Carew, it’s one I could have done without ever watching. But duty before self. “Only charlatans assert they know how to transform sand into gold.”

Spencer Tracy wanted to play his Jekyll and Hyde as a binge drinker who acquires a mistress while on a bender and adopts the Hyde identity to cover it up. Jack Palance’s Hyde has a lot in common with someone discovering drinking can loosen him up. in JEKYLL AND HYDE … TOGETHER AGAIN (1982) the analogy is cocaine (very cool in the early 1980s) rather than booze. We open with movie titles spelled out in white powder which someone then snorts up through a rolled dollar bill. They’re not exactly hiding the analogy.

Jekyll’s (Mark Blankenfield) wonder drug does indeed come in white powdery form. The brilliant surgeon hopes that by unleashing our animalistic side, humanity will no longer need surgery because — well, it’s unclear whether he thinks our beast side would have Wolverine’s healing factor or what (but it sounds oddly similar to the natural-health “woo” we’re seeing today). In any case, the effect of taking it accidentally is that he becomes a hyperkinetic, sex-crazed Hyde with gold chains materializing on his chest along with a razor for cutting coke (nope, not subtle).

Jekyll has treated singer/sex worker Ivy (Krista Errickson) who’s stunned when he gives her money to help her out and doesn’t want sex in return. As Hyde, he’s uncontrollably randy; at first she’s willing, then he becames stalkery/harassing and she finally decides to shoot him. As Jekyll he’s so chaste he’s almost asexual, much to the frustration of his fiancee Mary (Bess Armstrong). I was pleased that while Mary’s initially written as the stereotypical rich bitch who loses out in the romance, she turns out to be much more likable, and much more interested in sex than her man is.

The film looks like someone saw Young Doctors in Love a few months earlier and decided to knock it off. This has much the same slapstick, goofball humor such as intercom announcements in the background (“We need a proctologist in the E/R. An asshole is waiting.”). The climax comes when Hyde runs out of a medical awards ceremony … into a Victorian streetscape with hansom cabs and Sherlock Holmes among his pursuers. It does have its moments but not quite enough of them. “Man has not evolved an inch from the slime that spawned him.”

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1980 or 1981 I can’t find a consistent date yet) is a British production that stars David Hemming as a Jekyll as middle-aged as in Stevenson’s novel. The mutton-chop whiskered scientist mixes social reform with visits to houses of prostitution, then returns home from the brothels haunted by guilt. How much easier life would be if he could purge his evil side (I think “evil” is a strong word for what he’s doing) and live a life of virtue. Of course, that’s not how it works out.

This is an extremely Victorian adaptation: crowded, bustling streets, stuffy offices, social-reform societies and sex workers who don’t look very glamorous or sexy, plus a brothel keeper (Diana Dors) who unleashes a tirade of Victorian slang in one scene. It’s another film that presents Jekyll as an addict, repeatedly quitting his other life but never able to drop Hyde for good. It’s a low-key film as Hyde isn’t the savage he frequently is — even when he rapes one of Jekyll’s household staff, it’s less brutal than Fredric March’s Hyde would have been. Overall an excellent job; Desmond Llewellyn (Bond’s Q) plays the doomed Sir Danvers Carew. “I never thought the pleasures of the flesh were the work of the devil.”

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