DR. HECKYL AND MR. HYPE (1980)

 

Man Is Lion To Other Wolf: Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980)  

By Alain Leroy II

Superficial, sunny and silly b-horror opulence starring an astounding, Oliver Reed, who bifurcates between a monster of a split personality. That is a split personality that is a monster to handle. Reed is mostly a monster in more than half of this movie, but his double is perhaps the most polished, articulate and elegant Reed fans would see before his alcoholic decline. Unfortunately, Reed passed away before the dawn of the millennium but perhaps his character in Heckyl & Hype represents the desire for destruction that is so often misinterpreted as the contemporary drive for longevity and power.

As an adaptation of Jeckyl & Hyde at the very genesis of the 1980's in America would suggest, Mr. Heckyl is a kind, gentle but perverted monster in love with innocence and civility, however, the external world finds his appearance so hideous he lacks a shred of self-confidence. 

And that’s when his “cousin,” Mr. Hype, shows up to wreak havoc on his existence with Hype's bloated high-flying drone of an anarchist alter-ego.

Oliver Reed is brilliant as both characters. Ever consider how he’s one of the best actor ever? I do, constantly. A true marvel of cinema.
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 BOTTOM LINE

Mr. Hype preys on a pretty prostitute he encounters on a desert road who has a pet lion in her bed. The lion is a symbol of the ferocity that overcomes the alter-ego Reed portrays, the 'naughty by nature,' Mr. Hype. For the timid doctor, Heckyl, becoming everything he thought he wanted to be erupts in disaster in this self-defeating, monster comedy. 

“Heckyl, you’re a sanctimonious schmuck.” - Hype

Moral of the story: combine good looks with an immaculate ethical code, a clear conscious, and rightful action and the future of power would be less repressive.
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WHAT WOULD MAKE IT BETTER?

Mr. Hype himself was very drawn to anarchism.

I like to imagine, left on the cutting room floor of this lack of dharma-addled, plenty of pharma-addled B-horror from the 1980's is an astute and commanding speech from Mr. Reed. 

He would be portraying Mr. Hype lecturing on about socialist thought, perhaps even quoting Mikhail Bakunin:

They [the Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up. We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

— Mikhail Bakunin