Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1972)

Sorry, this movie sucks

Powerful

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Hammer Films Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde unashamedly pinches elements from the real-life stories of the most famous serial-killer of all Jack The Ripper as well as the grave-robbers Burke & Hare, who later turned to murder & then selling the bodies to unscrupulous doctors for medical research. On top of all this it is also, obviously, based on Robert Louis Stevenson's book The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Handsome Ralph Bates plays Dr. Jekyll, his alter ego Sister Hyde by the beautiful & seductive-looking Martine Beswick. Like many of Hammer's best movies it has superb production standards with real style & panache. Ralph Bates was an excellent actor & any excuse to ogle the ravishing Martine Beswick in various states of undress is fine by me. An entertaining mishmash of a movie!.

Made in the early 70's, Hammer had the liberty of inserting a few naked breast shots in this loose adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novel. Now that's always a welcome bonus in any film, especially when they belong to the ravishingly beautiful vamp-queen Martine Beswick. Yay!Wait, why am I opening this mini-review by commenting on Ms. Beswick's undressed upper body parts...? Nevermind that, sorry."Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde" plays out very predictable (of course, we've all seen this famous horror story adapted before), but it's a fun film nonetheless. Things never get tedious and Hammer's vintage horror-vibe is present all throughout. Inserting the "Jack The Ripper" storyline in this adaptation was a nice touch, though I still felt a lot more could have been done with it (well, probably not, due to budget, cast & time restrictions). So in the end, we have a Hammer quickie that felt more like as if it was initially written to be turned into a theatre play. But the film has its terrifying moments and remains entertaining until the end. The climactic conclusion is very short-lived, but satisfying & splendidly executed.

Every now and then someone has a real brainwave - in this case, it was a simple idea: "Mister" sounds like "Sister", so why don't we retool Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde so that Jekyll's potion changes him from male to female? Voila - sheer genius.Then add to this a stroke of casting brilliance - the always reliable Ralph Bates plays a dignified, restrained and by-the-book Dr Jekyll, while Martine Beswick plays an unrestrained, sensuous (and murderous) Ms Hyde. And, wonder of wonders, Bates and Beswick really look a lot like each other to start off with, so it is extremely easy for an audience to accept that they are the same person after Jekyll's potion has done its stuff. All that is missing is a morphing effect to change one into the other and, given that this movie is from 1971, 20-odd years before computer graphics first raised their head in any serious fashion, I guess we can forgive them the absence of morphing.This brilliantly conceived, wonderfully cast, idea is played, for all it's worth, as a mixture of grand guignol and black comedy bordering on farce. Though it is dated in some respects, it is still very entertaining, and is definitely one of hammer's better offerings.Try to catch it if you can.

Hammer's take on the Robert Lewis Stevenson's unforgettable novel is an amazing one indeed! Personally, I think that the great Hammer Studios produced some of their greatest films in the early 70s, and "Dr. Jeckyll and Sister Hyde" (1972) is a great one indeed. Directed by prolific master Roy Ward Baker ("Quatermass and the Pit", "The Vampire Lovers", "Scars of Dracula"), this bizarre take on Stevenson's "Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde" accomplishes to be creepy and darkly funny at the same time.The regretfully underrated Ralph Bates stars as the eponymous brilliant scientist Dr. Jeckyll, who experiments in order to create a serum which is to make human life spans longer. In this film, he does not simply turn into a bad man when he tests the serum on himself, but into a female - more precisely into the stunning Martine Beswick! And the beautiful, but unscrupulous 'Sister Hyde' will do anything to stay..."Dr. Jeckyll and Sister Hyde" is doubtlessly one of the most bizarre Hammer films, and one of the few 'mad science' themed films Hammer made outside their brilliant "Frankenstein" cycle starring the great Peter Cushing (another one being "The Horror of Frankenstein" in which Bates played the eponymous Baron). Other than Dr. Jeckyll, the film also includes other popular Horror themes, namely the real-life events surrounding Burke and Hare and the Jack the Ripper case (though, in real life, Burke and Hare committed their crimes sixty years before Jack the Ripper, but then - who cares?). The film is terrifically set in late 19th century London, the dark and foggy alleys of which Hammer recreates with the usual Gothic greatness.Ralph Bates was a great actor and he makes a fantastic, sinister Dr. Jeckyll in the lead here. The ravishing cult-siren Martine Beswick (who was a Bond girl twice, in "From Russia With Love" and "Thunderball", and who also stared alongside Raquel Welch in Hammer's 'Cavemen vs. Dinosaurs' flick "One Million Years B.C. in 1964) is great as Sister Hyde; Miss Beswick is stunningly beautiful, but it is quite difficult to enjoy her beauty knowing that she is the female incarnation of Ralph Bates. Susan Broderick is very cute and likable as the neighbor girl who falls for Dr. Jeckyll, whereas her annoying brother (Lewis Fiander) is intrigued by Sister Hyde."Dr. Jeckyll and Sister Hyde" is simultaneously a suspenseful and creepy and often hilariously comical. In good Hammer tradition, the film profits from a great photography, Gothic set-pieces and a great score. The film maintains a creepy atmosphere from the beginning to the end, and is full of pitch-black morbid humor. Overall, this is a film that should be seen by any Horror fan. My fellow Hammer-fans in particular cannot allow themselves to miss it.