The immortal story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde gets an update as we so often see with so many classics. The movie is a low budget adaption of the story that most of us are so familiar, either by other films, theater or the novel itself. Within the first few minutes, viewers are introduced to eeriness, horror and gore......Suspense has been built, and you simply got a taste of the horror to come; It can only get better. Right? Well, not quite.
Tony Todd plays the dual role of Jekyll/Hyde and my respect for such a talented actor made me refrain from shutting this movie off early. Disregarding the low budget appearance of some scenes and it's questionable dialog throughout, it's still difficult to enjoy this horror film. Some of the biggest problems I had with this remake, was the horrendous job on Mr. Hyde's makeup. In some scenes, Mr. Hyde looks so fake you almost anticipate and imagine Tony Todd taking off his mask. I haven't seen such terrible makeup work, since The Howling 3 and the Wishmaster's sequels. The tag-line for this film is "Release the Beast".....Well, if you somehow enjoy this film up to it's conclusion, than maybe you can make better sense of the word "Beast" being used better than I did.
Tony Todd's acting isn't that bad but it can't save this overall bad film. Another veteran in this film, is Vernon Wells; you remember the infamous Bennet villain from Commando? If you do, you will shake your head in disbelief as to how irrelevant his Dr. Dennis Lanyon character is in this. This update is creative and a twist to the original story. It starts with suspense and gore........It has decent Tony Todd acting.......but as it goes on, it gets closer to mediocrity. In my opinion, this movie failed miserably to capitalize on the excitement and suspense it introduced in the opening sequences.
I rate this movie 2 out of 10. For Tony Todd's attempt to save this, and the creative retelling of a timeless classic story.
