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.

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.

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

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.

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.