Crew
Director – Jerry Belson, Screenplay – Jerry Belson, Monica Johnson, Michael Leeson & Harvey Miller, Producer – Lawrence Gordon, Photography – Philip Lathrop, Music – Barry De Vorzon, Visual Effects – R. Greenberg Associates, Special Effects – Dewey G. Grigg, Makeup – Mark Busson, Production Design – Peter Wooley. Production Company – Titan Productions.
Cast
Mark Blankfield (Dr Daniel Jekyll/Hyde), Bess Armstrong (Mary Carew), Krista Erickson (Ivy Venus), Michael McGuire (Carew), Tim Thomerson (Dr Knute Lanyon), Peter Brocco (Hubert Howes)
Plot
Genius surgeon Daniel Jekyll quits surgery, despite many pleas to stay, in favour of research. There he tries to develop a drug that he believes will harness man’s animal instinct. Going to sleep in the lab, he sucks a straw up his nose with his snoring and then accidentally snorts up the drug, which transforms him into a sexually insatiable swinger.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is the most-filmed ever horror story. In Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again, Robert Louis Stevenson gets the Airplane (1980)-styled farcical treatment. A few years earlier had seen the not-terribly-funny spoof Dr Heckle and Mr Hype (1980) but Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again is by far the more amusing.
The idea of Dr Jekyll who now snorts his drug up like it was coke and turns into a Mr Hyde who is a swinger with giant afro – his transformation even sprouts rings and gold chains, as well as a permanent erection that hisses when doused with water – is an appealing twist.
The film snaps along merrily, unconcerned whether a gag works or not. Some of the gags are funny – like where Jekyll grabs a car, uses the woman passenger’s Mace as breath-freshener and jams her into the sliding roof where her screaming is taken for an ambulance siren, or the parody of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) where a line moving across a map represents a Transatlantic train journey.
At its worst, Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again offers a preponderance of scatological and racist cheap shots – Jekyll has to remove a foreign object from a patient’s vagina, which turns out to be an Oriental man. Mark Blankfield’s performance as Hyde is very bizarre indeed. At the end, Robert Louis Stevenson is appropriately seen spinning in his grave.
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