Three actors on the edge of sanity!

Cocaine was a wildly popular drug in the 1980s so perhaps it’s not surprising that along with the Hyde-as-cokehead comedy Jekyll and Hyde, Together Again we got a dramatic take on the same idea, EDGE OF SANITY (1989). It’s also a little surprising that it’s the second mash-up of Hyde with Jack the Ripper (following Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde) and the second film where Hyde’s killing spree is a response to childhood trauma (see also Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde). Nor is it as good as any of them.

Henry Jekyll’s (Anthony Perkins) research in the film is based on the real use of cocaine as an anesthetic in the late 1800s. At the time it seemed like a wonder drug, one that could numb the body to surgical pain without the potential harms of chloroform or ether. The film never names the drug but it’s quite obvious, particularly when Jekyll mentions how it peps him up, gives him more energy and generally makes him feel wonderful.

Trouble comes when a lab monkey spills some chemicals on Jekyll’s coke stash, creating vapors that transform him into a freaky-looking version of himself. Worse, it unlocks his hidden self, which turns out to be a pissed-off, vengeful child. As a kid, Jekyll spied on his father getting it on with a woman when the couple caught him; his dad beat him while the woman laughed.

Hyde apparently has no hard feelings about his father humiliating him but bitterly resents the woman, whom he assumes was a whore (much as Bernie Casey’s Dr. Black blames the brothel staff for not helping his dying mother but doesn’t hold a grudge against their male clients), for mocking him. As Hyde he goes out into the streets and brothels, gets sex workers alone, and kills them. When his wife has almost talks him back to sanity, he starts thinking about that woman from his childhood, about a streetwalker who laughed at him while her pimp stole his money … Suddenly he imagines his wife laughing too, then Hyde resurfaces. It’s the embodiment of Margaret Atwood’s line about how men fear women will laugh at them, women fear men will kill them.

The result comes off very much like an anti-drug preachment (kids, don’t do cocaine!) which makes me wonder if that was part of the inspiration. It’s not good and feels more misogynist than Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (the lead women were a lot stronger there) but from the point of view of writing my book, it is an interesting take. “Suppose you found yourself at the edge of a labyrinth — or better still a dark forest.”

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1989) was an adaptation J. Michael Straczynski penned for Showtime’s Nightmare Classics, with Anthony Andrews as a shy, socially awkward Jekyll unable to speak his love for Laura Dern out loud (she is obviously eager for him to do so). Instead he buries himself in his research to manipulate brain chemistry and create a man of pure goodness — which, spoilers, goes horribly wrong.

Andrews’ performance is impressive. He’s a sadly awkward man as Jekyll; as Hyde he looks normal physically but his body language is repulsive (fitting Stevenson’s concept of Hyde as a man who repels people for no clear reason). He’s rigidly stiff to the point his lips hardly move, stares right past the people he’s talking to, rarely raises his voice above a monotone. It’s creepy, though it’s at odds with the idea of Hyde as a man of no inhibitions. Was it that along with his inhibitions his ability to connect was stripped away by the transformation? In any case, Jekyll finds himself hooked on his new life (“Without him, I find the days colorless and sterile.”) leading inevitably to tragedy. A good adaptation, and Dern is always charming to watch. “He thought he could release his true nature, and he did. The poor fool — it was me.”

When I watched the 1990 JEKYLL AND HYDE for Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan, I found it competent and entertaining but not a stand-out. That assessment doesn’t change. Here Michael Caine’s Jekyll, like Andrews, believes in changing people by changing brain chemistry, much to the outrage of Joss Ackland’s Dr. Lanyon. A titan of medical theory, his view is our biology determines our mind at birth; he sees Jekyll questioning this as a personal attack. To complicate things, the widowed Jekyll was married to Lanyon’s daughter and over the course of the movie winds up in an affair with her married sister (Cheryl Ladd)

Caine does a competent job in the lead but nowhere near as good as Andrews or Jack Palance. And the movie hand-waves any details that would make Caine’s Jekyll less likeable. Rather than trample a little girl (the memorable scene that introduces us to Hyde in the original novel), Hyde simply knocks her aside while running from the cops, after which a horse tramples her; Jekyll, rather than buying off her family, treats her injuries. The movie does show Hyde is a monster — he abuses the women he sleeps with and thinks nothing of killing people who piss him off — but we never get a reason why Jekyll keeps turning back into such a monster. “Evil is not a scientific word.”

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