Note: This movie is being released on Blu-ray by Olive Films (www.olivefilms.com – www.facebook.com/olivefilms) on Sept. 13th.
Here’s another title that has been rescued from obscurity and is arriving on Blu-ray after spending a considerable amount of time out-of-print and hard-to-find. Frankly, it’s a title that I somehow missed during its original run, despite coming from major studio Paramount and combining two genres elements (monsters and slapstick comedy) that I would have gone crazy for as a kid.
While the popularity of horror films in the early part of the 80s no doubt helped green-light this project, Jekyll and Hyde… Together Again is more of a wild comedy that appears to take its cues from contemporary hits of the time like Airplane! (1980). However, the movie underperformed at the box office and completely dropped off everyone’s radar soon after its release. Now the morbidly curious can find out exactly why.
Comic Mark Blankfield stars as the dual personalities. If his name doesn’t sound overly familiar, Blankfield was a star of the ABC sketch comedy series Fridays, which ran from 1980 until 82 as a competitor of sorts to Saturday Night Live). Dr. Jekyll is an charitable, serious and slightly boring MD at Our Lady of Pain and Suffering Hospital. When the protagonist is not entertaining his stuffy fiancée (Bess Armstrong), he’s developing a powder to harness the power of man’s survival instincts and prevent human suffering. After self-testing his own formula, he turns into a wild, party animal and seeks to bed a kindhearted prostitute (Krista Errickson).
Frankly, you can’t make movies like this anyone. While the movie clearly adopts the stylistic devices of Airplane! and tries to throw as many gags on the screen as it can, this effort is far stranger and much more politically incorrect. The occasional joke results in a chuckle. There’s one dig at health insurance programs and a couple of crude but amusing off-handed comments. Supporting cast members like Tim Thomerson add a few humorous moments – he plays a smug plastic surgeon. Other scenes, if not funny, are weirdly captivating, like a musical number towards the close.
However, the majority of material flops. Star Blankfield is clearly giving it everything he has, but even the manic energy on display can’t make up for a weak script with a non-stop barrage of cocaine-related gags. The formula as a white powder is clear enough, but the character and costuming takes it one step beyond. Every time Hyde appears, he dons a silly hairstyle and grows gold jewelry as well as a long fingernail used for coke-sniffing. Amazingly, while the illicit substance causes him trouble in the moment, it ultimately helps him in the end. Again, it’s something you’d never see today.
I suppose it would have been a brave approach… if only the movie were funnier. Like the bluntly depicted transformation, most of the humor comes in the form of bad sight gags; the character frequently grows a exaggerated bulge in his pants after snorting. Additionally, his lascivious pursuit of the prostitute character comes off as threatening. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect are a series of racially insensitive bits. They’re really terrible gags that land with a dead thud. In general, there’s a manic wrong-headedness to the project. One wonders if several people behind-the-scenes weren’t on a substance similar to the one the main character is on.
As for the image quality, it’s pretty decent overall. There’s some grain present in the picture and it definitely isn’t reference material, but the transfer keeps the film look intact and presents a clearer (and most disturbing) look than this title has ever been given in the past.
Jekyll and Hyde… Together Again is pretty terrible, but I will give it some credit. It certainly isn’t boring; your jaw will drop from its inappropriateness and the approach, which almost comes across as surreal. The final gag of this fascinating misfire may be its best – a camera moves through a graveyard and into a coffin, where author Robert Louis Stevenson (who wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) literally spins in his grave. If the author ever saw this take on his story, I’m sure it would be an accurate representation of his reaction.
In the end, the disc will please devotees (and there are many, at least online), although the movie itself is more for bad movie fans than those looking for a great comedy.