As the director of Confessions of a Necrophile Girl, Deep Web XXX, and eROTik, Domiziano Cristopharo has made his creative impulses crystal clear since his feature debut, House of Flesh Mannequins in 2009. The Italian director frequently takes inspiration from controversial Erotica Horror filmmaker Joe D'Amato and directly referenced this influence in Hyde's Secret Nightmare with a significant focus on graphic sexual deviancy and ultra violence.
Henry Chagall (Claudio Zanelli) is a sexually impotent scientist who starts to experiment with unusual and unethical methods to cure his condition. The scientist, and his assistant Hans (Giovanni la Gorga), succeeds in reanimating the reproductive organs of a fresh corpse and the men find themselves devolving into a surreal and brutal sexual odyssey.
Sex and death, in cinema, are inextricably linked since John Carpenter brought these concepts stunningly together in Halloween (1978), but some directors have made even closer connections between these concepts in an attempt to blur the lines of decency and art, including Frank Henelotter's Frankenhooker (1990) and Brian Yuzna's Bride of Re-Animator (1989). Necrophilia, however, is the final taboo in horror cinema as mainstream audiences remain unaccepting of this unsavoury topic. European filmmakers are often more willing to approach these highly controversial ideas, and Cristopharo, in particular, seems eager to explore the deviant depths of sexual depravity and abhorrent violence.
With Hyde's Secret Nightmare, Cristopharo also makes a token, and tenuous, effort at linking established and meritorious literature to his perversion, as he views the project as an erotic reinterpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson's gothic novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But Hyde's Secret Nightmare is, simply put, an unbalanced exercise in absurdity and vulgarity, where pornography and banal body horror is mixed together like a poorly prepped pub Hot Pot. The use of nudity is unstimulating and extraneous, without purpose or creative merit. The use of Italian porn actor Roberta Gemma is a deliberate attempt to titillate, and push established cinematic boundaries aside, but her ample appeal fizzles out amongst the unrefined profanities and ludicrous actions of her male counterparts.
Cristopharo fills each scene with macabre, yet meaningless images, with the sole aim to shock, but only succeeds in expressing a staggering level of immaturity and a lack of style. The film ultimately fails at mirroring the shock value and carnage found in similar low-budget, cult 70s/80s exploitation horror and only compounds foul and appalling sequences into segments of obtuse nastiness. The squirming discomfort I felt whilst watching Hyde's Secret Nightmare was not due to being mentally challenged out of my metaphorical comfort zone, but instead, because the film was tedious, overly experimental, and inconsequential. The project plays out like a juvenile, pimple-faced sixth-grader's multi-media school project, which resulted in a stern speaking to by the school's Head Teacher.
Lars von Trier (Antichrist), Srdjan Spasojevic (A Serbian Film) and Tom Six (The Human Centipede) were able to bring our collective nightmares to life with visceral and profoundly impactful and thought-provoking films, which included intense, and sometimes vulgar events, while Domiziano Cristopharo fails miserably at achieving anything near meaning, reflection or art.
