Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death

Never mind calling it a WEIRD film! It's a classic horror tale on drugs! This is certainly the finest example of no-budget filmmaking I've witnessed , as plenty of useless, senseless, but violent kung-fu fighting makes for a real good time! That's most of the fun I had watching this, a movie that knows no bounds when it comes to weirdness: awful acting, bad scripting, and virtually no plot and storyline. It's actually pretty good, that is if you've grown a full appetite of lost and forgotten bad films that millions are missing today.

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

Could you believe it? I accidentally picked this movie up in Music Zone instead of another Vipco Horror "Classic". Initially I found the film to be, like another reviewer here said "impossibly bad". Forty minutes into the film I actually had hopes for this poor monstrosity. It is incredibly grim and tacky, and the kung-fu scenes are cringe-inducing. For example, after the evil doctor injects victims with serum in his dungeon, they wake up and suddenly transform into black-belters and beat the crap out of each other. There was an uneasy atmosphere throughout the 90 minutes and there isn't one scene not shot in darkness. The sado-masochism, violence against women, sexual content and disturbing S&M undertone easily earn this a place in the Vipco library. As a movie itself it really stinks!

2/5

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.

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.