SYMBIOPSYCHOTOXIPLASM (1968) is an arty metatextual film about director William Greaves filming various couples working out their romantic issues in Central Park, but also filming himself, his cast and his crew making the movie we’re watching. That leads to discussion of the acting challenges, the director musing on his role and the crew arguing they’re the only ones who truly get Greaves’ vision.
This could easily have been pretentious crap that appeals only to clever people talking loudly in restaurants (to use Monty Python’s phrase) but it works as a quirky piece. The Take One was added to the name when Take Two came out in 2005. “What makes you think everyone else is so stupid and you’re so smart?”
Greaves’ SYMBIOPSYCHOTOXIPLASM Take 2 1/2 (2005) is less interesting because 90 percent of it remakes the original film and I’ve seen that one. Greaves argues at one point that it’s not the same movie because everyone working on it is aware of the original — but that doesn’t affect what we actually see. “That’s the way life works — every situation is without precedent.”
AFTER YOU MR. HYDE is a musical stage production starring Alfred Drake (as Jekyll and Hyde) and Nancy Dussault (as his fiancee Margaret) that New England’s Goodspeed Opera House (which provided the photo above for use in my book) staged in 1968. I was lucky enough to find a recording on YouTube, though as it was taken by an audience member and doesn’t include video (not feasible back in the pre-cellphone days) I couldn’t gather much.
What I did learn (partly from notes at the link) is that this was the basis for the ABC Kirk Douglas musical. Like a lot of stage-to-screen adaptations, they’re quite different; the only songs that survive are “Something Very, Very Good” and “I Bought a Bicycle” (the result of Hyde’s libertine ways loosening his regular self up a little). And the stage show’s ending has Jekyll commit suicide, leaving his friend’s baffled what could drive the doctor to that step. “The good in me emerges/purged of evil urges/What a splendid plan!”
I can thank my brother for reminding me that DARK SHADOWS included a Jekyll and Hyde plotline though my research reading would have tipped me off to it anyway.
The legendary supernatural soap concerns Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), a vampire from the 1700s released in the present where he winds up protecting his modern-day kin from assorted supernatural threats. Other characters included Quentin Collins (David Selby), immortal werewolf; Willie Loomis (John Karlen), Barnabas’ sniveling, perpetually frustrated Renfield; Elizabeth Stoddard, the family matriarch (Joan Bennett); Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall), a doctor and haematologist helping Barnabas; Angelique (Lara Parker), Barnabas’ witch wife and tormentor; and Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott), the reincarnation of Barnabas’ lost love Josette.
The story takes place in 1970 as one of the plot strands in the “parallel time” era. After Barnabas and his kin defeat the Lovecraftian Leviathans, Barnabas wanders into Collinswood’s east wing and discovers a gateway into another timeline. Watching, he discovers that in that timeline he married Josette, lived a happy mortal life and rose not from his grave. He stumbles across the time boundary only for Willie’s counterpart — author Will Loomis — to trap Barnabas in his coffin and force him to recount the truth about his life, which Loomis will turn into a book. This kept Barnabas offstage while filming House of Dark Shadows, the theatrical spinoff movie (I believe Maggie’s absent from a chunk of this plotline for the same evening).
The Jekyll figure is Cyrus Longworth (Christopher Pennock), BFF to Quentin Collins, here the head of the clan and newly married to Maggie. The opening of the story has Cyrus making the usual research into dividing our good and evil natures. As in the Jack Palance adaptation Curtis produced a couple of years earlier, Cyrus wakes up the morning after testing his drug with no memory of where he’s been; there’s a bottle in his pocket, though, and other evidence he’s been having a very wild night.
Initially Cyrus’ new life as John Yaeger follows the movie’s plot arc but not entirely. For one thing he has a fiancee, Sabrina (Lisa Richards), which Palance’s Jekyll didn’t. For another, Cyrus is caught up in the other plotlines swirling around Quentin — is his late first wife Angelique really dead (yes, but she gets better)? Can Maggie step into Angelique’s shoes (a plotline borrowing heavily from Rebecca)? While Yaeger takes the usual mistress (as Palance’s Hyde did), she doesn’t die, she simply vanishes from the story once Cyrus falls in love with Maggie (maybe she was just a placeholder until Scott got through with the movie?).
Once Cyrus meets Maggie, realizes she’s having trouble with her marriage (Angelique’s ghost is undermining it) and falls for her, things get creepy. Cyrus is too inhibited to make a move (his love for Sabrina doesn’t figure in at all) but if he becomes Yaeger again …and he does, and winds up kidnapping Maggie and eventually murdering Sabrina.
While Cyrus’ addiction to his free, daring life as John Yaeger is normal enough for a Jekyll, he’s carrying a great deal of self-loathing. Yaeger laughs at Sabrina “Don’t you have any idea how much he hated being himself?” I think he’s quite sincere.
Overall it’s an interesting take, well-performed by Pennock.
When WEDNESDAY debuted on Netflix three years back, I caught the first episode. Perfectly competent, didn’t really interest me … though it’s interesting that it exists at all.
Charles Addams’ cartoons in the New Yorker about a ghoulish, creepy family came to the small screen as The Addams Family in 1964 (first season review here, second here). 90 percent of what we associate with the Addams came from TV: names, characterizations, the searing passion of Gomez and Morticia. The premise of the show was that the Addams see themselves as a perfectly nice suburban family like anyone else, always friendly, helpful and considerate; half the time they don’t even notice everyone around them is freaking out. Lynn Spigel argues that like most 1960s paranormal sitcoms the characters stand in for “what if Irish or Italians moved in next door?” which was no longer an acceptable premise, and also subvert and twist the standard family sitcom tropes.
After a Saturday morning cartoon a few years later, the Addams vanished except in syndication (syndicated network reruns on local TV stations used to keep old series running for years) and the occasional special (Screen Rant has a good list) but then the 1990s gave us the movies Addams Family and Addams Family Values. Impeccably cast (Raul Julia as Gomez, Anjelica Huston as Morticia, Christopher Lloyd as Fester) it kept the characters but made them much closer in tone to the original cartoons. This family really did seem ghoulish and creepy. The movies are fun but my heart will always be with the original TV show.
The breakout star of the movies was a young Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams, here ghoulish and slightly murderous to boot, all delivered in a deliciously deadpan tone. Her star turn elevated Wednesday from the kid of the original series to a central character … which is how we wound up with Wednesday.
Jenna Ortega delivers a great deadpan performance as Wednesday, shipped off to the Nevermore boarding school where her parents met; retaliating against the jocks bullying her brother Pugsley (they were swim team, she put piranhas in the pool) has convinced them leaving her to mingle with “normies” isn’t wise. Nevermore is home to Outcasts — witches, werewolves, sirens, gorgons, making it feel a lot like Monster High (here’s a more detailed breakdown). Inevitably the dour, tart-tongued Wednesday is paired with sunny werewolf Enid (Emma Myers) as her roommate, the perfect dioscuri for her (unsurprisingly Enidsday gets shipped a lot).
Where the original TV series was intrusion fantasy — the Addams were one weird paranormal thing in an otherwise normal world — Wednesday is much more urban fantasy, where our world is host to lots of different supernaturals, even if the normies don’t see it. Part of my lack of interest after watching E1 (“Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe” — all episodes have “woe” in the title somewhere) was that while it was well done it wasn’t “my” Addams Family.
And probably that teenage drama interests me less at my age than it did a few decades back, even when it’s well-executed. Plus the producers are Gough and Millar of Smallville and that never worked for me either.
Also I’ve always preferred Thing reaching out of the box in the original show to the detached hand running around. Yes, classic Thing was cheap special effects but that hand was definitely attached to Something we never saw; that’s creepier.
But regardless, when I learned there’s a type of Outcast called a “hyde” — a seeming ordinary human who mutates into a grotesque monster under stress — I binged S1 this week. It’s not a major entry in Jekyll and Hyde, but I like to catch even the little ones.
At the end of S1, Wednesday spots a monster murdering a student. In the best tradition the body disappears and nobody, not even perky Enid, likes Wednesday enough to believe her. Naturally she starts investigating, with occasional support from friendly teacher Thornhill (Christina Ricci). It soon becomes obvious something bad is going down … but what? The mystery makes this even more Monster High: we have a Hyde as villain, and its handler plans to destroy the school the way Eddie Hyde did in the Monster High movie.
As there’s more Hyde stuff in S2 I may give that a watch, if I have time. If not, I think I’ll be fine as is. “Dead people are notoriously bad at returning calls.”
JULIA JEKYLL AND HARRIET HYDE was a 1990s BBC kidcom in which Julia (Olivia Hallinan) is an 11 year old science nerd and a perfect angel, always happy to make life easier for everyone from parents to schoolteachers (it’s to Hallinan’s credit she’s able to make Julia likable to the audience). Then a school bully tampers with Julia’s new elixir and the result is her randomly turning into seven foot tall Harriet Hyde.
The idea of sweet little Julia having a troublemaker hidden inside her could have been fun. Instead the show treats it like a personal embarrassment, nothing more — if Julia broke out in unsightly zits, the plot wouldn’t change much. Still, it lasted for three seasons on the Beeb. “Now drink up and I’ll put that door back on its hinges.”
NIGHT GALLERY was Rod Serling’s 1970s follow up to The Twilight Zone. It was a frustrating experience for Sterling, who discovered the network (NBC) wanted his name but not the distinctive touch he’d brought to his earlier classic. This episode has Alex Cord desperately trying to find a beautiful woman (Keep In Touch … We’ll Think of Something), a woman apparently walling her husband up alive (The Merciful) and in With Apologies to Mr. Hyde, Adam West quaffing a certain potion …nothing unwatchable, nothing that stands out, either. “I keep telling you, go easy on the vermouth!”
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE AFTER ONE HUNDRED YEARS is a collection of essays about the significance of the novel, what Stevenson was trying to say, how earlier drafts of the novel compare to the finished work and more. Most of it, unfortunately, cries out for the Pooh Perplex treatment — it’s very heavy on Freudian analysis (I thought that was dead and buried by the 1980s but obviously not) such as the reveal Mr. Hyde is small because he embodies Dr. Jekyll’s inadequate penis. I am … unconvinced. However there are some interesting bits of discussion so it was worth the effort.
Barring some obscurity I’ve not heard about, THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (2006) is probably my last film for the book, not counting rewatches (there’s still TV). It is, alas, a poor one to go out on. Reflecting the era when nanotech was the superscience that would change anything, Jekyll (Tony Todd) is a researcher dying of heart disease; as he can’t wait the three years to complete animal testing he injects himself covertly, creating the viciously bestial, acromegalic-looking Mr. Hyde (Todd tested the treatment on a chimpanzee so logically it turns him into an ape-man … that makes sense, right?) who hunts down women, rips them to pieces, then has sex with the corpse.
Todd is good but this is very slasher film and has a huge amount of idiot plot. For example, Jekyll transforms into Hyde during a closed-door session with his boss, whom Hyde kills — why does everyone assume “Oh, Jekyll must have left before this Hyde came by, which somehow none of us in the outer office noticed?” Tracy Scoggins plays Detective Utterson; Tim Thomerson is wasted as a sardonic medical examiner. “I haven’t had a relationship with god in a long time — but on the other hand, I’ve had more than few glimpses of the devil.”
Cover by Jack Kirby, all rights to image remain with current holder.
For our date last weekend, TYG and I went to the Sick Chick Flicks specfic film festival in Chapel Hill. I’d written about it for The Local Reporter (at the link) and figured it would be fun to catch. Unfortunately we couldn’t stay for more than about 2.5 hours because we had to get back to the dogs. It was still fun while it lasted.
Like other film festivals I’ve been to, most of the menu was shorts. In Tasty Tongue (2024) a pretty Asian woman feeds a dour Chinese American slacker a delicious meal, please don’t ask where she got it from, okay? Of course, he really should have asked … and he should definitely have wondered why she always hides her face behind her fan. “I’m ugly, fat and disgusting.”
The Forest of Dreams (2024) was more upbeat and more fantasy than horror: A young woman on the outs with her Mom ignores the parental warning about the eerie eponymous woods where she eats fairy food and dances with a tree. Charming.
Shrieek (2024) didn’t work so well for me. Despite her husband’s outrage, an abused wife goes out in search of The Thing In the Woods. What follows was too murky and confusing (storywise, not in the camera work) to figure out.
I spotted one twist in the black-humored One Lonely Heart (2025) wherein a plumber makes an evening call on a woman who’s lost her engagement ring down the sink. As they get to chatting it turns out he’s lot someone too, she invites him to dinner … I won’t say more but this was much fun.
All the films, and the feature below are way better quality than we expected. I’m not sure if that’s because the average level of professionalism in indie films is higher than it used to be, the tech available is better, festival selections are above average or a combination of those factors.
The feature film BABY FEVER (2025) stars Allisha Pelletier as Kate, an expectant mother who’s nervous about her and her spouse moving to a small community where they don’t know anyone and have no support system. She’s happy when the local mom’s group admits here — they’re pretty exclusive — even though they don’t seem awfully, awfully perky. And isn’t it a little odd they never have children at these events?
This primed me to expect some variation of Stepford Wives. Instead we’re off on a weird ride where reality itself seems to be crumbling around Kate. Cryptic conversations. Uncertain flashbacks. Horrifying events that may or may not have happened. Is her husband lying to her and gaslighting her? Or did she imagine the horror of what he did? I’m honestly not sure. In the end the lack of clarity or answers proved frustrating but the film was, even so, well-made and watchable. “My husband has spent his whole career in nephrology.”
Even my Jekyll and Hyde viewing didn’t cover much. So I’m going to do another movie poster/image page, with the theme being a poster to fit each of my movie books.
For Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan, my book on 20th century made-for-TV specfic films, we have Bermuda Depths. This barking-dog insane film involves curses, a 200 year old beautiful ghost and a giant killer turtle; regrettably I couldn’t find a copy to get a detailed review in my book because while it’s not good, it is memorable.
For my second book, The Wizard of Oz Catalog, how about a great film, Return to Oz. Considered a flop at the time, it has a lot of fans and I think it’s appreciated more now (this is a very subjective assessment).
For my third book, Screen Enemies of the American Way, we have a poster for 1942’s Little Tokyo, USA. It’s one of a number of racist films showing that sending Japanese Americans to concentration camps was a good thing because we supposedly couldn’t trust those fiendish yellow devils.
And last but not least, for Aliens Are Here, the indescribable Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Okay, I could describe this alien abduction Christmas film tbut you might think I was making it up.
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.”
All rights to covers remain with current holders. My apologies for not knowing the artists.
MADAME HYDE (2017) is a French film I’d never heard of before I stumbled across it last week: a freak electrical accident renders frustrated science teacher Madame Gequil (Isabelle Huppert) — pronounces JeeKUL — happier and peppier but also turns her into a living lightning bolt after dark, a power she’s happy to exploit dealing with people who piss her off. A dull one, good only for the In Name Only appendix. “You think you can acquire great power by a magic, miracle or accident.”
VICTORIAN DEMONS: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin-de-Siecle by Andrew Smith argues that by the end of the 19th century, the English upper classes were seriously concerned that the English Male had lost his mojo, becoming too degenerate to stand against such outside threats as syphilis and Dracula’s vampirism. Smith sees Dr. Jekyll and his friends (hence my interest in this book) as degenerates too — wealthy and upper-middle class but without the moral fiber for Jekyll to resist temptation or for his friends to take any real action against Hyde. He also argues the “invisible deformity” that makes people recoil from Hyde is that Hyde presents as a gentleman but the presentation is just enough “off” that it doesn’t work. I’m not sure how much value this hs to my book, but it was an interesting read.
JEKYLL (2007) was a six-episode BBC modern take on Stevenson, and every bit as good as I remembered it. In some ways better as I appreciate the ways it stands out. Irish actor James Nesbitt is a creepy maniacal fiend as Hyde, grinning in sadistic glee whenever he goes wild (I’d have loved to see him as the Joker).
As the series starts, Tom Jackman (Nesbitt) has learned he has a dangerously violent, immoral second personality, which is why he’s separated from his baffled wife Claire (Gina Bellman) and their kids. He’s worked out a rough relationship with his alter ego, communicating back and forth by a pocket recorder: “Hyde” (not named that until later) knows if he kills anyone, Jekyll will turn himself in for the crime; Jekyll knows if he tries to cure himself, Hyde will commit suicide.
That’s bad enough, obviously, but now a mysterious organization has begun hunting the duo. It turns out that Doctor Jekyll was a real person whose experiments triggered a superhuman mutation into Hyde (the series incorrectly states humans haven’t evolved in millennia); his friend Robert Louis Stevenson fictionalized the story, partly to cloud the truth and make it harder for anyone to exploit Jekyll’s research). Tom is his last living relative and therefore the object of the organization’s schemes.
The actors are excellent and Steven Moffat does a great job on the script. I like a number of the details such as Tom suffering from Hyde’s wild nights — Hyde stays up d rinking, Tom gets the hangover and the exhaustion the next day. It does have a few flaws such as several characters insisting Jekyll can’t be Tom’s ancestor — he had no children! The possibility of a bastard child kept from the limelight or a child of Hyde’s doesn’t come up (it’s the latter). Still, this is definitely one of the better modernizations.“The truth is, if I’m being honest, I don’t get a lot of pleasure out of killing children — but I get enough.”
THUNDERBOLTS: The New Avengers (2025) arrived on Disney + last weekend so I finally caught it. And with one glaring weakness, it deserves the enthusiasm that greeted it.
Yelena the Black Widow (Florence Pugh), the Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and US Agent (Wyatt Russell) all wind up at the same secret lab on missions for shady CEO Valentina di Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss). Her shadiness has her under Congressional investigation; now she plans to blow up the secret lab and also eliminate three people who know too much. Of course, this doesn’t work; they escape the lab with Bob (Lewis Pullman), the only survivor of something called the Sentry project (if you know Marvel’s Sentry, you know this is Not Good).
This was a fun, action-packed film with good characters mostly performed by good actors (Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes eventually joins in). I found Russell bland as US Agent and I could barely stand Louis-Dreyfuss — she’s annoying in the role and seems to think she’s still working in sitcoms. And given the amount of blood she has on her hands by the end, keeping her out of jail didn’t satisfy me either. Still, thumbs up for this one despite her. “Anyone else have any pointless childhood stories to tell?”
THE SCOTTISH PLAY (2019) has a director gathering a cast for a production of Macbeth, assuring them all the theater legends about a curse on the show are just legends. Meanwhile his Lady Macbeth (Tina Benko) has met up with the ghost of Shakespeare, who desperately wants to rewrite the show, having had 300 years to brood about where he got it wrong.
This one didn’t work for me. It’s so low key and quiet that it couldn’t hold my interest, and Shakespeare constantly talking in Shakespearian style (I give them a point for acknowledging that was a stage thing and not everyday Elizabethan speech) grew annoying more than engaging. “I am as far from my home as fish are from heaven.”
The third season of HPI ended with Morgane and Karadec not speaking and Morgane (Audrey Fleurot) discovering she’s pregnant but unsure of the father — it could be Karadec (Mehdi Nebbou) or a couple of other characters. Of course, there are still murders for the team to solve but now there’s also Lamaze class, identifying the father, bringing the subject up with the father, Karadec returning to the murder investigation team … The fifth season wraps up in France later this month, after which I assume it will air here on Hulu. “If head lice attack, let me remind you of my all-natural coconut oil remedy.”
Cover by Mark Bagley. All rights to images remain with current holders.
