Tubi is my friend

I’ve found Tubi useful for catching multiple films for Jekyll and Hyde. The search function proved unexpectedly useful this week when it turned up a couple of movies I didn’t have on my list (and one TV show I’ll get to reviewing down the road. Not good movies, but I’m not watching stuff for fun. And pretty much nothing in today’s list was good.

Like I, Monster, JEKYLL AND HYDE (2017) shows doing a faithful adaptation of the novel is usually a bad idea — Stevenson’s book is simply not cinematic. As in the book, Lanyon tells Utterson about his nightmarish encounter with Hyde, but not about what he saw (i.e., the transformation); that has to wait until Utterson reads Lanyon’s final letter. That pads the running time but given that we know what he saw, it doesn’t build suspense.

This is a low budget film and looks it: anachronistic costumes, contemporary street shots and interior scenes shot with lots of close-ups, which I assume is to keep down the cost of set-dressing. Of note for having Hollywood veterans Mickey Rooney and Margaret O’Brien appear in a small scene.“I’ve heard that laboratory he keeps in his home is more reminiscent of a Mary Shelley novel than a man of science.”

JEKYLL AND HYDE (2021) isn’t good but I give it points for a different spin on the tale. We come in at the end of the story, shortly before Utterson discovers his trusted friend Jekyll has committed suicide out of guilt over his crimes as Hyde. When he digs deeper, it turns out Hyde is Jekyll’s evil serial-killing twin who drove his brother to suicide and framed him for the murders. Not first-rate but watchable. “I took into my hand that glass beaker of the purest decaying foulness and pressed it to my lips.”

Now the others — DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (2008) also tries a new angle, turning the story into a legal thriller. Jekyll (Dougray Scott) is a present-day doctor whose experiments in tapping our inner self which holds “key to healing and fitness” (reminiscent of similar medical woo in Jekyll and Hyde Together Again) but creates a brutal psycho whose drive is to kill and kill again (I do not buy that he represents Jekyll’s dark side). When Jekyll goes on trial for murder, he wants to plead guilty as the only way to stop Hyde. His attorney insists on fighting the case (which is unethical — the client calls the shots) via an insanity plea, the prosecutor dismisses this split personality nonsense as balderdash, then the attorney suddenly pivots to proving Edward Hyde is a completely different person (nobody asks why she started with an insanity plea). Scott is adequate as Jekyll, good as Hyde, but the ending twist badly needs more explanation. “Changing into another person was not a metaphor.”

Classic Hammer took three shots at Stevenson’s story starting with The Ugly Duckling above. Having recently risen from the ashes, the resurrected Hammer gave it a fourth riff with DOCTOR JEKYLL (2023). Twentysomething ex-con “Robert Stevenson” take a job as caregiver to troubled pharma executive Nina Jekyll (Eddie Izzard), with strict instructions about maintaining 24/7 surveillance within the house and making absolutely sure Nina never goes off her meds — but Nina seems so nice, is it really necessary to be so paranoid? Yep; it turns out he’s been hired in an elaborate 11-dimensional chess game by Rachel Hyde to kill Nina, then jump bodies to Rob.

The hook is obviously having trans woman Eddie Izzard playing a woman but the film doesn’t give her enough to do. The film spends two thirds of the running time trying to be ominous about what’s coming but instead it just plods along. And while Nina gives the usual origin of Hyde as her dark side, how then can she possibly possess Rob? The flamboyant climax with Rachel quoting Hamlet makes me think that would have been a better route than straight evil (e.g., “I always wanted to be on the stage but my family insisted I go into STEM!”). As is, the movie’s a flop. “Two moves ahead. That’s what you need to be.”

According to my online reading, the musical MONSTER HIGH (2022) was a reboot of the 2010s cartoon series though with the same core protagonists representing the classic Universal trio — Clawdeen (half-Latina, half-werewolf), Draculaura (vampiric but also practicing witchcraft) and Frankie (“My parents made me 15 days ago — but not the way most kids are made.”), all students at the eponymous school where monsters, free of any human contact, can be themselves.

Clawdeen, with dog ears and claws, has never fit in among humans but she’ll be expelled if Monster High learns she has a human side. When she learns a previous hybrid, Edward Hyde, hid a potion away that can make her all monster, she and her friends set out to find it. Alas, it turns out this is a scheme by Hyde’s son Eddie to obtain the potion and thereby gain power enough to take revenge on both monsters and humans.

Online reading indicates this was controversial in Monster High fandom for shifting Clawdeen from an African-American Brooklyn werewolf into someone lighter skinned and mixed race — not that the latter was bad but she’s very much the stereotype of the Tragic Mulatto (just as Eddie Hyde is the angry outcast version of the same cliche). Even without that this didn’t work for me but I’m obviously not the target audience. “Oh my gosh — friendship, sacrifice, this is so touching!”