Terrific reworking of Jekyll and Hyde

This time around Jekyll (Cameron)has the sense not to experiment on himself, but on his mentally deficient man servant (an idea reused in later years by "Lawn Mower Man")
Once the monster is released from the Benign giant Cameron points and aims him like a gun and uses him to extract revenge on his detractors.
Way ahead of its time the film uses the idea of quintessential essence extracted from blood cells, the very building blocks of life, to create a serum that can rewrite a man as an animal. In other words genetic engineering before there was such a thing.
The idea of a werewolf is touched on by the superstitious old village woman, but this is not a werewolf movie, it is science fiction dressed up as horror, as was Stevenson's original novel.
Zucco is as usual wonderfully mad and overplays it to counter the beautiful subtle underplaying of Glen Strange as his hapless victim.

The scenes when the wolf begins to take over Strange, changing him without the injections is genuinely frightening as are his hints and slight changes of posture while in human form to suggest that he is becoming more and more bestial.

The ruthless Murder of the child in the first transformation, echos Hyde stamping on the street waif in the book as does the initiated change in the car echoes the murder of Utterson.

All in all a fine film and a great script by the forgotten Genius Fred Myton.


Atheism is a religion in the same way that celibacy is a sexual position