Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death

Dr Jekyll's grandson is alive, mad and conducting inhuman experiments in San Francisco, aided by his black hunchbacked assistant called Boris. The Dungeon is not, disappointingly, a place of torture but where Jekyll's human guinea pigs, once injected with serum, fight to the death using martial arts. This movie is certainly a curiosity. These fights scenes, which are fairy long, are probably the best thing about this dreadful movie. And that's not saying much! The plot and script are as awful as the acting. Pretty much the whole film takes place in Jekyll's poorly lit mansion, near darkness at times. The film is incredibly cheesy, dreadfully bad but also slightly entertaining for those reasons. Released in the UK as The Dungeon.

Underneath all the cheese and tacky sets there is a deeply disturbing aspect. James Mathers, who wrote the film as well as starring as Dr. Jekyll, plays a really juicy role where he gets to indulge in all sorts of viciously dramatic sadism. He is an incestuous rapist who stabs his sister with an ice pick and pours boiling water on her because she "makes him want her" like his mother did. He keeps a blond chained up and sexually molests her until she screams, at which point he has an orgasm. He then beats his braindead black servant viciously when he thinks he was trying to "soil" his beautiful blond girlfriend. All the while he's leaping around, clasping his hands and giggling. I just can't help thinking that a man who wrote this specifically to act it out must have some serious issues.

The famous mad doctor's nth-great-grandson carries on the family tradition by developing a serum which transforms those under it's influence into unstoppable karate-chopping killing machines. By and by, the doctor is visited by an old colleague who is unaware that his own daughter is being subdued in a room just arm's length away, kept as a sedated slave for the Doctor's cruel desires(he also frequently tortures his half-wit assistant and tragic lobotomized sister).

This mercilessly unprofessional travesty seems to be filmed around footage of some sort of martial arts competition, and the dire results are mind-bending. Surely one of the worst horror films of the 70s...if you have cultivated a taste for uniquely terrible cinema, then you might find this an especially scrumptious morsel.

3/10

A new category of 'bad'- a movie I could only watch in twenty-minute doses, but had to finish just to see where they ended up with the alleged plot, like watching a bus with no brakes, packed full of orphans, careen down a mountain road to certain doom. As thoroughly wack as a Frederick Hobbs movie, where things happen for no apparent reason and with great intensity, but without Hobbs' technical skill.

My GHOD is this thing wrong, on more levels than you've had hot dinners. Oh, sure, there's a plot, some crapola about Dr. Jekyll's grandson inventing a serum that releases people's aggression, but what you see on the screen is an endless parade of dramatically-lit kung-fu matches, community-college-level overacting to no discernible purpose, and the most frightening eye-rolling by a female character outside of Creedence the Druid in Troll 2.

What makes less sense than the plot is that somebody wrote large checks to both make this movie and then to obtain the rights to distribute it. What makes even less sense is that it was NOT a career-ender for all involved. The worst offender, James Wood, who wrote/ directed/ produced/ drove the honey wagon, did disappear from the exciting world of cinema entirely, showing that there is perhaps a loving God in heaven. The only cast member with a shred of acting ability, Dawn Carver Kelly (Julia), also took this as her cue to get completely the hell out of the biz. But everyone else went on to other projects; James Mathers, the unwatchably out-of-control Dr. Jekyll, continues to work into the present. Euuuuwwwww.

If you believe in the primacy of Art, the perfectability of Man, and the essential order of the Universe, avoid this blazing paper bag of dog dookie as you would a panhandler with a wet, hacking cough.

My review was written in February 1982 after a Times Square screening: Filmed in 1978, "Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death is a very strange takeoff on the Robert Louis Stevenson story, combining martial arts action with mad scientist and bondage motifs. Commercial prospects seem limited for this odd cheapie.

Set in San Francisco (no exteriors are used, however) arbitrarily in 1959, pic limns the demented behavior of the original Dr. Jekyll's grandson, portrayed by screenwriter James Mathers, with much eyebrow raising and eye-popping. He's experimenting with a serum for mind-control, worked on by his ancestor and later by Nazi scientists.

Oddity is film has no Mr. Hyde character and hence no transformations from Jekyll to Hyde, probably a first among the dozens of screen versions of the tale. Instead, Jekyll injects criminals (of both sexes and various races) with the serum, staging lengthy one on one kung fu fights in his basement between the "maddened" patients.

Helmer James Wood displays an unhealthy preoccupation with on-camera injections and stages the kung fu material listlessly with cheap direct-sound recording coming off more realistically in place of the usual dubbed, noisy sound effects. Despite a blonde in bondage for him to play with, film has no nudity to titillate the fans. Whole cast of corny horror stereotypes self-destructs in a silly, basement killing spree climax.

Wood handles most of the pic's tech credits himself, and his lighting is so bad that when the thesps miss their marks they are swallowed up in total darkness.