‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ is a movie that’s a little special to me in that a good friend of mine, while working for Patricia Rose Casting, was instrumental in rounding up the cast for this film. I even remember him telling me about the movie and how pleased he was with himself when was able to land Tony Todd to be the lead in this flick since we’re both self-professed Tony Todd slappies. After watching the movie I had to call my man to congratulate him because though ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ was truly suspect as a work of cinema, it did have a rather awesome collection of hot women in its cast, to which my boy also told me an interesting backstory about that as well that unfortunately I’m not privileged to repeat. But we do have the issue of this film to deal with at the moment, a movie, as we said earlier, is truly suspect as a work of cinematic art.

I would like to think that somewhere the estate of Robert Louis Stevenson is still raking in residual loot since this is like the nineteen thousandth retelling of his classic tale but alas I’m of the mindset that those rights have long expired since I’m guessing this particular production isn’t doling out any more money than is absolutely necessary. Regardless, Mr. Todd assumes the role as the erstwhile Dr. Henry Jekyll who we see in an opening scene having a battle with his alter ego Edward Hyde who escapes out of the laboratory, finds a pretty coed, rips her to shreds and then sodomizes her. In that order. Arriving on the scene to investigate this murder are detectives Enfield (Steven Wastell) and Utterson (Tracy Scroggins) who is afraid to carry a gun – which kind of defeats the whole ‘cop’ thing I’m thinking. Forensic investigator Swift (Tim Thomerson) tells the cops that were this not the center of Los Angeles, he’d swear that some wild animal did this crime, but since this is the center of Los Angeles this can’t be the case. These cops suck by the way.

What has caused the emergence of Edward Hyde in the good Doctor is his experimental nano technological heart medication that he has used on himself for the live trials because of his bad ticker. You see Jekyll has this young tall caramel colored beautiful wife with arguably the worlds greatest set of breast (Judith Shekoni) and he’s not even trying to clock out early on that, and quite honestly who are we to blame him? As time goes on Hyde gets more and more out of control committing more heinous murders which has our cops completely baffled. Then they find out that Jekyll is floating large amounts of cash to these recent murder victims which seems curious, and that Hyde actually works for the doctor, and the murders take place like a block from the school, and that Hyde has a history of brutally raping women and that Hyde likes to lick his colleagues against their will. Still, our cops wonder who could possibly be committing these crimes. Eventually Mrs. Marple and Elliot Ness over here figure out that Hyde is their guy, though they don’t quite realize that Hyde and Jekyll are one. This will lead to some amazingly chintzy CGI, a big ape taking a hot woman to the roof of a tall building and a cop who has to overcome her fear of guns (?) to bring down the Menace of Edward Hyde.

I don’t quite know where to start with this one because it begs for derision from all angles. The last time we saw director John Carl Beuchler and Tony Todd together was in the movie ‘The Eden Formula’, a movie I certainly recognize as a tragedy of filmmaking in almost every way conceivable, but it was still a movie I absolutely loved. Now this Jekyll and Hyde joint is superior technically in every way possible over ‘The Eden Formula’ but I wasn’t entertained by it a tenth as much. My first problem was that Hyde looked vey much like a monster with fangs and a wrinkly face and talons but yet nobody really seemed all that concerned about that since he walked amongst us as if dudes that looked him were fairly normal. Surely after meeting him the first time our crack cops could have noticed the talons and fangs and perhaps suggested a DNA test may be the next order of business. I had no idea that Tracy Scroggins was still working and we are happy that she’s still alive, because girlfriend was like in an episode of ‘Manimal’ which will always secure a special place in our hearts, but she did make quite possibly the worst movie cop on the planet earth. The whole ‘I’m afraid of my gun’ thing, unless it was some kind of psychological phallic subtext that I didn’t get, was completely worthless. The special effects were uniformly awful, the story was uniformly stupid and the dialog I’m guessing was written by some of those cute test monkeys we saw in this movie who somehow gained access to Final Draft.

The acting however was above average thanks largely to Tony Todd working overtime to bring both of his characters to life. The movie did have Tim Thomerson in it though he was largely wasted in a throwaway role. Man, if you got Todd and Thomerson in a movie together with Tony Todd, then you had better put those two ancient vets to work brother and let them do their thing! Then let’s say you take actress Judith Shekoni, who’s hot as hell, shrink her down and compact her a bit and then you end up with actress Danielle Nicolet who’s hotter still. Outstanding! And Tracey Scroggins was in ‘Manimal’.

‘The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ was fairly terrible but it did have plenty of Tony Todd which did make it at least watchable. I’d like to thank my friend for his duties as a casting director and though I’m not one tell this dude how to do his job but if any future projects come along and an actor or actress has ‘Manimal’ on their resume, and that includes you Simon MacCorkindale, you might want to let them slide on to the next project.