Review for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Director: John Carl Buechler
Released: 2006
Genre: Horror

I like to compare horror films to amusement park attractions, since the two possess similar traits. Both are designed to provide a vicarious thrill, and are created with the intention of evoking shrieks of terror from the viewers/riders. Horror takes many forms in literature and cinema, but for brevity's sake I'll lump everything together. Let's say that The Exorcist and Alien represent the top tier of flicks in the genre; they're like the Goliath and X roller coasters at Magic Mountain, because they're well made and memorable. Then you have films like Nightmare on Elm Street and Tremors, which aren't great but are endearing in their own ways. Watching them is like taking a walk through a "house of horrors" attraction at a fair- it might not be genuinely scary, but at the very least it is entertaining. Then there are movies like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: viewing these is akin to being on one of those horrible carnival rides, where you hop into the little cars that go around a track inside a stuffy enclosure with bad lighting and laughable props, and just as you stop cursing at yourself for wasting a dollar's worth of tickets on the debacle, the fog machine catches fire and burns the entire structure to the ground with you inside. That's what watching The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde felt like.

Strange Case (I refuse to type out the entire title again) is an abomination in the world of horror films. I watched it on Netflix, which is a great site with one drawback: it has a terrible ratings system. Since you can only rate a film in increments of whole stars on a scale of one to five, the vast majority of movies have a user rating between three and four, no matter how good or bad they are. So when you see a feature with a rating barely above two, such as with Strange Case, you have an idea of just how much pain you are about to subject yourself to, even before you see the shoddy opening credits flicker onto the screen.

As I'm sure you've figured out by the title, Strange Case is a cinematic rendition of the 19th century literary work of the same title, which, along with Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, is an archetypal work of mystery and suspense. Strange Case is a modern day interpretation of the story, set in contemporary Los Angeles and involving a bunch of nano bots. Apparently these microscopic robots can alter an organism's physical structure, which allows Dr. Jekyll to heal deformities in his laboratory chimpanzees. It also allows him to skirt FDA protocol, and the researcher uses his bright green nano bot serum on himself in hopes of curing his heart condition and extending his life. Of course, everything goes wrong, and Dr. Jekyll begins to mutate into Mr. Hyde at random intervals, raping and killing- nay, killing and raping- several women. The problem with Strange Case lies not with the rendition of the original story- although I don't believe anyone would tackle such a project and expect to win an Oscar for their efforts, it is something that could work under the right conditions- but with the fact that Strange Case possesses a level of technical quality that would put most Sci-fi originals to shame.

If the movie were a quarter of the length it is, I would simply pass it off as the average college film short. I would tell myself to wait a few years and see if the cast and crew have moved on to bigger and better things. Unfortunately, Strange Case drones on for a total of 88 minutes, and was directed by a man who was somehow able to find work on the set of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, John Carl Buechler. A glance at his page on the Internet Movie Database shows that his other directing projects include movies such as Troll and The Dungeonmaster. Strange Case was made two decades after those films, but it is apparent that Buechler has not evolved stylistically in the slightest. I'm pretty sure I can sum up his film making formula as follows: "I have a few handheld cameras and a bunch of C-list actors and actresses. Let's see if I can make a quick buck!"

Also, Vernon Wells makes an appearance in Strange Case as the doctor who investigates the wounds of Mr. Hyde's victims. He is an Australian actor who played the part of Wes in George Miller's visionary masterpiece Mad Max 2. In the course of twenty five years, Wells has been reduced from playing a character with a flaming red mohawk who slices people to bits in leather chaps to a meek, bespectacled doctor in an unforgivably bad gore-fest that is Strange Case- and he doesn't even do the killing. For shame!

0.50/4.00