Research viewing will probably dominate these movie-review posts for the next three months or so. This week one new film, one rewatch, and both of them suck.
JEKYLL + HYDE (2006) tells us in the opening crawl that med students Henry “Jay” Jekyll and Mary (Bryan Fisher, Katrina Mathews) have experimented on an ecstasy based personality-altering drug. You might think from that that Mary is a major character but no, she has two brief cameos, then she’s dead; Jay’s best friend Martha Utterson (Bree Turner) is the protagonist.
That’s typical of this movie which is filmed in non-linear fashion without the skill to make non-linear work. We open with Jay refusing to open the door to Martha while he deals with the bloody, half-dead woman in his bathtub … by finishing the job, then dissolving her with acid. Who was she? We never learn. Which is fair enough — Hyde does that sort of thing — but there’s no reference to her later, no consequence, nothing. In one scene, two of the students hook up in the morgue, then go home under the confused impression the other one has already left. It doesn’t advance the plot, doesn’t affect the plot, does nothing but fill space.
We don’t even know if Mary died from the experimental drug that’s turned Jay into sadistic party animal Hyde, or if it’s regular recreational drugs of which Jay, Martha and thir friends take quite a bit. We learn Jay’s motivation is “winning is why you play the game and that’s all there is” but not why he thinks that or how Hyde constitutes “winning.”
The movie feels like the theme is Kids Don’t Do Drugs; Martha comments at the end that this is a real story, not the first of its kind and definitely not the last. And if Jay had invented a designer party drug, it wouldn’t have affected the plot any. Calling this mediocre is charitable. “God is not a DJ, life is not a dance floor and while you’re searching for heaven, be careful you don’t find hell.”
SON OF DOCTOR JEKYLL (1951) hasn’t improved since the last time I watched it, but rewatching helped correct some errors in my review. The basic problem is that this is two plots that don’t mesh together. On the one hand we have Edward (Louis Hayward), orphaned son of Jekyll, learning about his ancestry and growing convinced he’s inherited a Hyde side; how can he marry his true love now?
On the other hand, we have a plot where the real horror is mass hysteria, mob violence, and the press whipping people into a frenzy. We’re told the mob creates monsters, that Hyde is a legend but Jekyll the man, even though we see Hyde in the opening death scene. Edward wants to prove his father wasn’t a madman so he attempts to recreate his famous formula — but how would proving his father really did transform into a monster help? This is random tropes thrown together (we learn Edward’s been working on Shocking — Shocking! experiments but the movie then forgets about it) to no good effect. “What’s real to me isn’t real to others — you know the name for that, of course.”
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