CKB
Walerian Borowczyk is the Ed Wood of art films. He directs like a child with a camera who can't even tell when it's running, letting scenes ramble on to no purpose, making good actors seem like amateurs in the process. Every scene is handled with clumsiness and confusion, and Borowczyk uses jittery handheld shots like a torture device on the viewer. His attempts at intellectual depth sound like a kid imitating the adults talking in the next room. His approach to women is childish and voyeuristic, using them as targets of hatred and lust, and he photographs their bodies accordingly. Borowczyk makes the psychopathic Hyde the hero, frantically deconstructing rooms and people's bodies without purpose or even relish, like a nasty little boy doing every naughty thing he can think of. This Hyde is not living in total freedom, but is enslaved to his compulsion to wage war on an adult world he cannot join. Borowczyk does nothing with his one potentially interesting idea -- that Dr. Jekyll's fiancé learns his secret and transforms herself into a Ms Hyde to be his partner in chaos. She doesn't even change physically (except for wearing 'feral' eye contacts) nor does she reveal any female insights on living the Hyde life, and after some more pointless mayhem she and Hyde proceed to chew each other (hopefully!) to death. The vastly superior Hammer film Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde treats this concept far more interestingly -- watch it and pass Borowczyk's foul pseudo-intellectual POS by.
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
11/06/22
Full Review
antti p
Dr. Jekyll (played by the lovely Udo Kier) transforms into a sadistic and too well endowed sexual predator Mr. Hyde, killing his victims with his male parts.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
03/30/23
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Audience Member
Det tog bara ett minuter av sövig synthmusik och udda skÃ¥disar som Udo Kier, Howard Vernon och Patrick Macgee som beter sig skumt i ett slott för att jag skulle känna mig Hemma. Mycket underlig, murrig, hypnotisk film med genomgÃ¥ende pervers och osund stämning. Inte lika mycket naket som i andra Borowczyk-rullar utan mer fokus pÃ¥ skräck och delirium. Precis som i La Bête innehÃ¥ller filmen klara drag av fars och drift med viktoriansk (dubbel)moral. Filmen är egentligen helt ologisk om man tänker pÃ¥ den som en vanlig spelfilm, det finns t.ex. ingen anledning till att karaktärerna stannar kvar i slottet efter att folk börjar mördas och skändas till höger och vänster av Mr Hyde, men det känns mer som att filmen rör sig med nÃ¥gon slags drömlogik som känns klockren. Jag önskar att jag hade sÃ¥ intressanta drömmar... Plus i kanten för att HELA JÃVLA FILMEN är skjuten i soft fokus! Särskilt i ett land som Sverige, där alla filmer ser ut som reklamfilmer för Länsförsäkringar, uppskattar man ju folk som skitit i det korrekta, kastat regelboken och spelat in filmen pÃ¥ sitt eget unika sätt. Det här är ytterligare en Borowczyk jag totalt omvärderat, när jag sÃ¥g den här för typ tio Ã¥r sedan tyckte jag allt var segt och trÃ¥kigt. Givetvis var jag dÃ¥ för ung och oförstörd för att kunna uppskatta sÃ¥nt här, idag är jag nämligen hänförd! Bästa Jekyll & Hyde-filmatiseringen efter den svinbra version frÃ¥n -31!
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/26/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Bernard Parmegiani soundtrack alert! In most parts, the soundtrack overpowers the film, and the visuals of the end climax seem to be a mere background for Parmegiani's electronic composition. The disorganized poetic style falls short of a successful narrative/editing experiment, and the crazed killer-rapist Mr.Hyde playing cat and mice with the inhabitants/guests of the mansion reminds me of a toned down version of the more adult La Bete (also by Borowczyk). Venerable Parmegiani soundtrack with Euro art sleaze still comes across as a little odd.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/17/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Vilken njutning, men varför så mörk bild?
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/03/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Wild and raving film, in which the great Polish director Walerian Borowczyk takes the Jekyll and Hyde story and transforms it into a phantasmagorical trip into the stranger dimensions of our animal lusts.
The film begins as it means to go on, with a small girl child chased through the dark Victorian London streets and then violently attacked by an unidentified gentleman. The action then goes inside the house of radical scientist Henry Jekyll, where visitors are arriving to sign a condolence book (Jekyll's pater has died) and celebrate the engagement of Henry to Fanny. Fanny's mother has brought them a beautiful Vermeer painting as a present, and the two are obviously very into each other, so promises well. But the evildoer who killed the child is found in the house, and of course it's Henry's lunatic beast of an alter-ego, Edward Hyde.
Hyde rampages through the house, raping men and women to death with his enormous spiked dick. A puritanical army general tries to bring order to the chaos but ends up killing innocent bystanders before being tied up to witness his own daughter acquiesce willingly to the blandishments of Hyde. The general whips his daughter after in fury. Things go from bad to worse, from mad to madder as Fanny discovers Jekyll's secret and, rather than rejecting him for his sexual violence, bathes in the same transforming bath as he and throws herself into the carnal carnage.
The film rampages along at a violent pace, as Borowczyk throws all caution to the wind to show us a repressed world in the grip of a rising demon, "an individual with no morality." The characters sometimes get together for philosophical debate - carried out at a passionate fever pitch - as Jekyll challenges his rival Dr Lanyon's dry materialism. When in the mouth of Hyde, the argument for "transcendentalism" becomes full of boasting that he can be both respectable and know infinite, unbounded freedom combined with accusations to the rational: "you commit even great atrocities in your dreams." The attempt to divide the world and human nature into civilised and bestial has resulted in Jekyll's utterly riven nature, as he emphasises that "both of my faces are me!" The film's biggest innovation is Fanny's throwing herself enthusiastically into the wicked ways of Hyde. Borowczyk's feminism is, as usual, complete and radical - patriarchy is a prison for women and they must commit any crime possible to escape. At the end, with both Henry and Fanny transformed into monsters of blood lust, they have at least finally achieved an equality which the civilised world denied them, as we leave them "wallowing in an ocean of feeling and pleasure." Borowczyk's take on the tale is amoral to the core, and Hyde's salaciously described and occasionally glimpsed weapon is used to puncture in the most visceral way society's veneer of respectable morality. Hyde is never condemned, and the "moral" characters are mocked and satirised mercilessly; only a brief glimpse of a black servant girl mourning over the death of the Indian butler gives us a pause to question the rampage of Hyde.
With it's enveloping dark shadows, maniacal sexual beasts, stabbing pizzle and constant murmuring & throbbing electronic score, the film is finally not rational statement at all about human sexuality and civilisation; it is rather something far more terrifying, totalizing, tempting and challenging - an embodiment of a human being's worst fantasies, a letting loose of all reigns, an admittance of the deepest and darkest of desires, when a man might look at his lover and say "my dream is to see your dead body" and find that this dream actually turns the lover on.
Udo Kier has wonderful moments both as the shook-up Jekyll and the shocking Hyde; Marina Pierro has never been more ravishing and striking; and Patrick Magee is at the zenith of his madness, and gets put through worse atrocities by Hyde than even Alex in A Clockwork Orange could provide. In Dr Jekyll et les Femmes, Borowczyk reaches his apotheosis with this film, and no one in cinema have ever gone further from a moralistic stance.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
Full Review
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