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Mubi's retrospective The Many Sins of Walerian Borowczyk is showing February 12 - June 18, 2017 in the United States and in many other countries around the world.The late 1970s marks a stylistic departure for Walerian Borowczyk, as the Polish director moved away from a controlled, painterly style and toward a ‘corporeal’ style, wherein changes in aesthetic choices allowed him to explore the human body in greater depth than in his previous films. While the liberal portrayal of sex and sexuality (lending itself to the liberal portrayal of bodies, human or otherwise) is present in Borowczyk’s live-action films as early as his anthology Immoral Tales from 1973, the preoccupation with the body specifically comes to the fore with the films Behind Convent Walls (1978), Immoral Women (1979), L’armoire (1979), Lulu (1980), and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981). It is in this four-year period that the viewer will notice Borowczyk's moving away...

Buckle up buttercup, ‘cuz ol’ Xiii is back in town, and we goin’ ridin’ on the freeway of fright in my black Cadillac!

The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Miss Osbourne

Release Date: Available Now on Blu-ray Written By: Walerian Borowczyk Directed By: Walerian Borowczyk Starring: Udo Kier, Marina Pierro, Patrick Magee

Show of hands (or claws, or whatever you ghouls have): how many of you knew that ol’ Walerian Borowczyk—you know, the dude that directed The Beast, that flick with the be-donged creature that managed to cover every square inch of everything in cu…err, fluid—directed an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic nightmare novel Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? No one? Well, I didn’t either, but he did, and I got to watch it. How close will he keep to the original text? Read on and find out!

Well,...

Robert Louis Stevenson’s literary horror classic Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published in 1886, just a decade before the birth of cinema and only two decades prior to its first screen adaptation (William N. Selig’s now lost Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Since then a lengthy list of cinematic interpretations have come to fruition, from the 1931 film directed by Rouben Mamoulian which earned Fredric March an Oscar for his performance in the starring role, to the 1941 remake that boasted of names like Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner, through a TV movie featuring Mickey Rooney in his very last screen performance. Despite the lengthy list, there is certainly no adaptation quite like Walerian Borowczyk’s hyper sexualized The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne.

By 1981, the year of the film’s release, Borowczyk had (somewhat unwillingly) been pegged as an art house...