Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1972)

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

This is a very strange variation on the old Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story. In this re-imagining of the Stevenson tale, Jekyll has been trying to create a serum to prolong life and reasoned that as women live longer, it must be something about the hormones. But his experiments allow him to change gender!!! There is no MR. Hyde in this one! But, to continue his work, he finds he needs to kill young ladies--and here the story seems a lot like Jack the Ripper. There's even the infamous Burke and Hare (famous for grave robbing in Edinburgh long ago) making an appearance in the film. So, we have sex changes, Jack the Ripper-style murders and Burke & Hare (who influenced Stevenson to write "The Body Snatcher")--this film has a ton of plots crammed into it. Oh, and lest I forget, a bit of a soft-core porn film, as when Mrs. Hyde appears, it's often naked time! That's because like many of the Hammer films of the 70s, they spiced it up with some nudity to try to draw in audiences--as film revenues were way down from the studio's heyday. I think this film actually suffers from too many plots. Now I would NOT have made yet another Jekyll & Hyde film---there have already been too many. But to have so many divergent ideas in the film seemed to muddle things a bit. A sharper focus would have made for a better film. It also didn't help that the acting and dialog were rather weak...especially the dialog. As a result, this seems like a rather weak horror entry by Hammer.By the way, get a load of the way that Mrs. Hyde so easily crafts a red dress from just a curtain! It reminds me of the "Gone With the Wind" take-off from "The Carol Burnett Show"--minus the curtain rod!

*** Contains Spoilers! ***Dr Jekyll, searching for The Elixir of Life (or even An Elixir of Life, I don't suppose he's that fussy really) finds himself transmogrifying into a woman with a penchant for wearing red and slaughtering prostitutes. Mixing the Jekyll and Hyde story with the Jack the Ripper story makes some kind of sense but adding Burke and Hare into the mix (60 years too late and in the wrong city) seems a bit odd. But then Hammer was never really one for historical accuracy - if you want to get really picky Jekyll's talk of creating a powerful anti-virus is pretty spectacular given that the first virus wasn't identified till 1898 ten years after the Whitechapel Murders (isn't Wikipedia wonderful? Suddenly I'm an expert on the Victorian era). So, pretty routine late Hammer stuff, all swirling fog and dodgy cockney accents accents. There were some nice moments, the best of which was the first transformation. We've all seen the Jekyll>Hyde transformation before, the actor will clutch his throat as if he has just accidentally swallowed a bucket of phall, stagger under the weight of fifteen pints of Special Brew lager, fall out of shot behind convenient piece of furniture and emerge, after a suitably dramatic pause and a couple of hours spent in Make-up, covered in hair and with a lecherous gleam in the eye. Here he staggers across the set and slumps into a chair in front of a full length mirror, he lowers his head into his hands (the agony!) and the hand-held camera tilts down on him till his head and shoulders fill the screen, music music music, and the camera tilts up again, Jekll's reflection is hunched over in the mirror, slowly he looks up, (we see what he sees as the camera is now in an over the shoulder shot) he drops his hands from his face and there is the female Hyde staring back at him. Pretty impressive. I had a real 'Wait! How did they do that?' moment. Jekyll, played by Ralph Bates, hadn't been out of shot for the entire transformation and there were no cuts or cross-fades that would have allowed a substitution. Rerunning it a couple of times the trick became so bloody obvious and elegantly simple. Real Jonathan Creek stuff.In the few moments the mirror was out of shot and we were staring at the back of Jekyll's head and shoulders, the mirror was moved slightly, rotated a few degrees so that, when camera picked it up again, it wasn't showing the reflection of Jekyll sat in the chair as it had been before but the reflection of the actress playing Hyde, sat in an identical chair placed off to the cameraman's left. Clever stuff. So clever I guess this was the basis for the film's 'The sexual transformation of a man into a woman will actually take place before your very eyes!' tagline. I wish the rest of the film had been that inventive.

Pretty good late Hammer. Not much to do with the original Stephenson story regarding the battle between good and evil within man but gives us an interesting twist. Indeed this mixes the aforementioned tale with that of Jack the Ripper and throws in Burke and Hare for good measure. And of course one of the more exciting added ingredients here is the lovely, Martine Berwick as Jekyll's alter ego or 'sister'. She's great throughout. His changes into her are effective, his gleeful peeks at herself fun and her spirited killing a treat. In fact the body count here must be very high because, after a languorous start, with voice-over we seem to scamper from one screaming bloody death to another.

Not to be confused with "Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde" ('95) or "Daughter of Dr. Jekyll ('57), "Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde" ('71) is a wonderful entertainment that was written and coproduced by Brian Clemens. Clemens, perhaps best known for his work on TV's cult series "The Avengers," as well as for writing and directing "Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter" (his only other film for Hammer Studios, in '74), also wrote a song for "DJASH"; needless to say, he is a man of many talents. In this film, he not only conflates the Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper in 1888, the notorious body snatcher/serial killers Burke and Hare (who both died many years before that, but no matter), and R.L. Stevenson's oft-told Jekyll and Hyde story, but gives it all a novel spin by having Jekyll transform into a woman. Also interesting is the fact that Jekyll, well played by Ralph Bates, is almost as monstrous as the Hyde creaturette that he becomes: Jekyll is willing to murder street trollops in order to obtain the female hormones needed for his experiments. Martine Beswick, it must be said, is perfect as Bates' "feminine side." She really does look like his female counterpart, and manages to appear both beautiful and scary looking at the same time. The film is very nice to look at, too; almost like an episode of "Masterpiece Theatre," but with more blood and mayhem. All in all, this is still another winner from the House of Hammer...with loads of fine extras on this DVD, too!