Oliver Reed once wrestled Alan Bates naked on the screen in Ken Russell’s Women in Love. I wonder if that was more than, or a less than, embarrassing experience when compared to starring in 1980’s Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype.
I’m still trying to figure out why Reed took this role at all. It is my understanding Hollywood was a bit shy to hire him around the time this made, due to his legendary alcohol intake. Still, his filmography shows he found work roughly continuously through those later years. More curiously, despite having been in comedies before, it wasn’t really his forte. I doubt he did it for the money, as this picture was produced by Cannon Films.
Things don’t exactly start out promising, though it was mildly amusing for a bit. This is the kind of comedy that should appeal to Mad Magazine fans, a complete farce that takes a shotgun approach to the jokes. It just throws as much as it can on the screen and see what sticks.
Alas, mostly these are allegedly funny names, which as that sage Roger Ebert once correctly postulated, are almost never humorous. Here we have the doctor’s offices of Heckyl, Hinkle and Hoo—the last of which named only so characters can have to frequently say “Doctor Hoo”. I think the average series of Doctor Who contains fewer occurrences of this combination of words, and that’s because it is inherently funny only once. The female characters have especially unfortunate monikers, usually related to backsides, such as Finebum, Pertbottom, Lushtush and Rosenrump.
Reed, as Dr. Heckyl, is a podiatrist in this office. He is well-liked by the staff and patients, despite having skin the color and texture of a rhinoceros, clawed hands and mismatched eye colors, one of which is red. Outside of the office, however, he is a pariah. Even the blind beggar whose cup he drops some change into dispenses with that money as if that is tainted somehow. I found that doubly bizarre, as it is only the doctor’s visual appearance that repulses others, and this is a blind beggar.
The doctor especially pines for Sunny Johnson, a lithe blonde he sees at the bus stop each day. Like the other shallow characters in this film, she is nauseated by his appearance. They never talk until she comes to him as a patient one day. If the message of this movie is supposedly how one should appreciate inner who a person is inside, it is undermined by Reed being smitten with Johnson solely for her looks. It isn’t like the doctor tries to better know any physically unattractive women.
That focus on outer beauty factors into the storyline in another way. Dr. Hinkle (Mel Welles) has created a serum that causes nearly spontaneous weight loss. There’s a group of five women of Rubenesque proportions who get a lot more attention once they are rail-thin.
Welles confides to Reed that more than one drop of this magic elixir would be fatal, so the suicidal Heckyl downs the entire bottle. Of course, this doesn’t kill him, but instead transforms him into a normal-looking person. This alter ego is supposed to be devastatingly handsome, but it is really just pudgy, middle-aged Oliver Reed.
The only remotely clever aspect of this movie is the monstrous looking doctor is kind-hearted, while the normal-looking Mr. Hype is monstrous inside. Hype, for whatever reason, is prone to killing women instead of bedding them. These murders are neither gruesome nor darkly humorous. One woman is killed in a way I don’t think it is possible, using the teeth in the head of a lion skin rug Reed improbably uses a bedspread. He offs his landlady in an equally unlikely manner, by plunging her big toe into the socket of a lamp. That at least ties into what appears to be a bit of a foot fetish for the doctor, which I guess isn’t too surprising for a podiatrist. As he says of Johnson’s feet: “At last, I found a foot I could love.”
The effects here are passable in some regards and dire in others. They are somehow both simultaneously, as far as Reed’s makeup is concerned, with the monster skin being rather effective, only to not extend even so far as his neck. There’s one particularly baffling moment where, as the doctor, he has the top few buttons of his shirt undone, revealing completely normal skin which contrasts horribly with that on his face.
There are also some irritating visual effects whenever somebody is being transformed by the elixir, strobing imagery so strong I had to look away from the screen and I don’t even have epilepsy. We’ll be subjected to a great deal of this near the end of the film as Reed starts ping-ponging almost at random between the two personae. Then there’s Doctor Hoo (Kedrick Wolf), who uses the formula to transition into Miss Finebum (Maia Danzinger). Those thinking this might be a surprisingly progressive, pro-trans stance will be gravely disappointed.
Even having said all this, I will concede I chuckled a couple of times, and laughed out loud at least once, while watching Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype, though I was immediately embarrassed to have done so. Some odd, minor elements suggest a potentially weirder film, such as a bit where blond twins reading a magazine inexplicably named Simpering.
Mostly, the film is off-putting, awkward and unfunny, as exemplified in a scene where Reed tells Johnson his condition is the result of his mother’s glue-sniffing addiction, and how even her milk tasted like the adhesive. Never mind how he remembers that! He concludes this bizarre monologue with, “Who would nurse me now?”, to which Johnson bafflingly replies, “I would—if I was a nurse.”
Dir: Charles B. Griffith
Starring Oliver Reed, Sunny Johnson, Mel Welles
Watched on Scorpion Films blu-ray