While watching this movie it's quite apparent that somewhere deep down in it there was a good movie and a good idea behind it all. However the overall end result it's pretty poor and really not interesting and exciting enough.
It does sound like a good main premise; Combine the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story with the London killings done by Jack the Ripper, at the end of the 19th century. Yet the movie its concept and story never seems to get off the ground. It's mostly because of the dull and uninspiring storytelling that the movie and its concept fall flat. There is rarely anything good or interesting happening in this movie and it's a real problem that the movie is lacking in some good decent mystery and tension.
The movie also fails to create a good atmosphere for its story. It seems so easy to create a dark and moody atmosphere, set in dark and moody London after midnight. Yet the movie is often too bright with its colors and everything is too smooth and perfect looking.
Lets take the victims for example. They are all perfectly figured young girls, who are real natural beauty's, with perfectly smooth faces and hair that obviously gets treated well on a daily basis. Not very convincing, considering that these girls are supposed to be 20th century prostitutes, who were considered to be the lowest of the lowest.
The story itself is also far from convincing. It's one thing that Dr. Jekyll turns into Mr. Hyde, due to the use of cocaine but this doesn't really explain his odd and sudden transformation into a completely different looking person. It's also quite amazing that no one ever suspect this aggressive and creepy looking guy to be perhaps in some way connected to any of the murders of the prostitutes, that he himself was also often seen involved with by many others. no wonder that the police never caught the ripper, if they really were this stupid as well in real life.
What makes this movie even more a weird watch is the fact that it can also definitely been seen as a soft-core-porn flick. There is really quite a lot of nudity in it and lots of different sexual acts get explicitly implied.
It's interesting to see Anthony Perkins in this type of role but he basically gets far too little interesting or new to do with his character. Nevertheless, he was a more than great actor, so it's still a bit of a pleasure to watch him in this. He was actually a very underrated actor in my opinion and it's a bit of a shame that most people only know him for his iconic "Psycho" role, while he was much more versatile as an actor. It's still a wrong move by this movie to only purely focus on his character, while things could had been given more depth and tension if it had some other strong solid characters in it as well.
A failed attempt at a potentially interesting and refreshing idea.
4/10
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