Jekyll & Hyde...Together Again (1982)

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that there are more than enough examples of stupid parody movies out in the world as it is?



As painful as it is for me to say this, it nevertheless comes to the fore of this review not only because of the subject for today, but also due to the fact that this epidemic of parodies can all be traced back as early and as simply as the late '50s/early '60s and the movies of Vincent Price.



Follow me on this; many rightfully believe that Price played more than his share of sinister characters in many a film, but he also lampooned those types of characters in several more movies (The Comedy of Terrors, Beach Party, The Raven, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine), a practice which served him long and well later on, to be sure. Which then got others on the bandwagon, making fun of respected actors and their personae in a manner which came across as self-important and utterly ridiculous.



Somewhere along the way, however, it didn't seem to matter whether or not the lead actors in such enterprises were dramatically-respected, highly-regarded or even that well-known.



And a larger spectrum of films came into the fold as well - not just horror movies but... well... everything. Spy movies are a good example, since just about every one of these spy films released in the mid-to-late '60s was an outright spoof of the better-known James Bond series, and some even featured members of that series' cast in major parts (but never Sean Connery..his brother, maybe, but not Sean).



So it then came to be that other film-makers, stars and the like created films that had fun with the traditions of movies in general. Which led to films like The Big Bus (a '76 parody of disaster movies), The Kentucky Fried Movie (which parodied many movies and TV shows/ads in its 90 minutes or so) and a slew of other also-rans like The Boob Tube, Tunnelvision, American Tickler and many more that I know I'll kick myself for not remembering, but there was a whole glut of them, trust me.



By this time, Vincent Price was long forgotten.



Come the end of the '70s these films were still going strong, and it seemed that a new example of such cinema came out once every other weekend at the local theater, multiplex or drive in - just the thing for a struggling studio to cobble together, film and release to make a quick buck (like, pornos, for example). And in 1980 this genre had something of a renaissance thanks to the wild success of Airplane!, which stayed firmly in the realm of parodying disaster films like the earlier Big Bus, but also went off on unexpected side trips into the realms of From Here to Eternity, Jaws, Knute Rockne: All-American, vaudeville jokes and immolation.



This movie being funnier than it had a right to be, proved the success of irreverent, inconsequential humor and spawned not only a sequel but several other films from the same team of directors and writers (Top Secret!, The Naked Gun - itself spawned from a TV series, "Police Squad!", Hot Shots!), which all had their own degrees of success, sequels and so forth.



As with all other successes, however, also came ripoffs and copies of the same ideas, which is also Hollywood's bread and butter, it seems. Which is also why we were treated in the years after Airplane! to movies like Student Bodies, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, The Creature Wasn't Nice (aka, Naked Space) and many more lower-budgeted direct-to-video deals that littered many a video rental places shelves for years after; you know, those VCR tape cases in the "COMEDY" section that were all light blue and washed-out from being out in the sunlight too long. Those ones.



This brings us to Jekyll & Hyde...Together Again, and also to the minuscule legacy of an almost-forgotten ABC TV show called "Fridays". You see, "Fridays" came out in the early '80s and was supposed to topple long-standing late-night comedy king "Saturday Night Live" from its golden throne. It didn't but it did introduce some intriguing b-level comedians to the viewing public such as Melanie Chartoff, Bruce Mahler and John Roarke, and even some who went on to the proverbial "bigger-and-better" things like Rich Hall, Larry David and Michael Richards.



But then there was Mark Blankfield. In spite of vigorous comedic acting in various roles in "Fridays" and his manic reminder of a more spastic, geekier (and shorter) Jim Carrey, this poor guy has never gotten a break; he doesn't even have a Wikipedia listing.



He must have had something about him, however, because the same year that "Fridays" was canceled, Blankfield got the top-billed role in a comedy that promised to be his launching pad to those same "bigger-and-better" things that all his betters seemed to attain with their debut film. You know, like Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman...and yes, those would be perfect examples in this case.



How does this all tie in with what I started out my review with? It all fits, you see, since Blankfield starred in a comedy based on the Robert Louis Stevenson horror classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Hey, it's no stranger an idea than any of Price's cornier appearances in a Roger Corman-directed Edgar Allen Poe adaptation.



What is strange, however, is the idea to make a horror parody filtered through the Airplane! ideology with a heavy dollop of Cheech and Chong thrown in for good measure.



The story goes: at the hospital known as Our Lady of Pain and Suffering, Doctor Daniel Jekyll (Blankfield) is intent on creating a super drug that will make surgery obsolete and the human body self-repairing. During his experimentation, the good doctor, through events more contrived than in an average Porky's movie, snorts some of the latest powdered drug he has been testing with and turns into a sex-and-drug-crazed wild man who sprouts chest hair, jewelry, an extremely long pinkie nail and something else extremely long that he...oh, I can't say it; you can probably guess anyway, so just go with that.



As expected, this plays havoc not just with his professional life (he's slated to perform an important "total body transplant" on the world's richest man) but with his personal life since he is engaged to the pretty-yet-vacuous daughter (Bess Armstrong) of the hospital's chief doctor and his alter-ego is seeing a very cute/hot/empty-headed young lady named Ivy (Krista Errickson).



There are a boggling amount of jokes involving pain (hospital-incompetence pain, crotch-shot pain, head-stuck-in-a-car-sunroof pain, etc.) or sex (as should be expected, but with animals?), sometimes even pain AND sex, but even more that come straight from the ol' high-school locker room involving body parts, minorities, the height-challenged, the elderly, homosexuals, Asians, the British, nuns, black people, and even more that involve combining more than one of these topics at once. Guess I gotta give writers Monica Johnson, Harvey Miller, Michael Lesson and director Jerry Belson credit for multi-tasking, at least.



And speaking of the director, Belson is better-suited for his starting point as a TV-sitcom director, seeing as how every scene is set as if it were best-suited for commercial interruptions and editing-down for its time slot. Small wonder that for every scene that is funny there are ten or twelve that are just badly photographed, set up or framed. Just goes to show that every movie can't be another episode of "Mary Tyler Moore".



I mentioned Blankfield earlier, who at least tries every physical trick in the book to make people from the fall-down slapstick school laugh. As for me, I was more concerned that he was going to hurt himself while going for the guffaws. He puts one less in the mind of Buster Keaton and more of Gerald Ford.



But like I said, at least he tried. Bess Armstrong stands there and looks pretty but is more-or-less the window-dressing of this piece, and I know for a fact that she can be funny (just watch The Four Seasons and Nothing in Common for good examples of Bess in full comedic flower). Krista Errickson plays the air-headed bimbo quite well and makes an understandable object of desire, but never rises above what she does and comes across as nothing more than "The Sex Object" - she might as well have been a RealDoll for all this movie cared.



No one else's performance is worth mentioning herein, save for one. Tim Thomerson, the Grand Old Man of B-Movies, plays the suave doctor Knute Lanyon. All teeth, hair and resonant voice, Thomerson's performance makes him the textbook example of stereotypical swaggering confidence - albeit with a startling secret. And perhaps if you've seen his performance in the short-lived NBC-TV sci-fi series "Quark", you may already know what that is, but why should I spoil one of this movie's very few funny moments?



Overall, there are maybe one or two good things in J&H...TA (the above-mentioned Thomerson performance, the train trip to London, the very last scene) but everything else is a classic example of trying too hard, relying on childish humor and half-baked ideas and depending on one person to carry a whole movie from beginning to end - when it was all they could do to carry on a 7-minute TV sketch.



My apologies to Mark Blankfield; like I said, he gave his all but he was like the poor guy who tries to hang wallpaper while the room is crumbling down around him. There's not much use in it when nothing else is going to support him.



One would have to stop and think, though: what IF this was a vehicle for Vincent Price?



Well, for one thing, I'm sure he would have asked for a few rewrites.