(Streamed via Free Movie Channel Retro)
Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing star in this loose adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from Amicus. Lee stars as “Dr. Marlowe” who believes in the duality of man and sets out to create a potion that can separate the evil side from the good. Eventually, he tries the formula on himself and becomes the evil “Mr. Blake”.
I’m not sure why they changed the names of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Dr. Marlowe and Mr. Blake. It’s not like this was Dragnet where they have to change the names to protect the innocent. Weird.
An interesting deviation to the source material is the fact that Hyde… err… Blake uses his formula on his psychiatric patients first. It’s kind of funny seeing a prim and proper patient turn into a horny harlot. We also get a genuinely unnerving scene where Blake on a whim sticks his cat with the potion, which turns out to be a bad idea, resulting in what is probably the screen’s fastest aborted lab experiment ever. Lee gets into a nifty knife fight in the street with a young punk too.
Lee’s make-up is rather subtle as his appearance gets a little more ragged and disheveled as the movie progresses. He’s mostly aided by a set of false teeth that crooks his mouth into a permanent malicious grin. He also widens his eyeballs a lot, much like he did when he played Dracula. The results are moderately effective. Lee naturally gets a decent lap dissolve transformation scene at the very end.
The film is at its best in the first half, which finds Lee experimenting on himself and others. It’s noticeably less involving once the focus shifts to Peter Cushing investigating the various crimes committed by Lee. Director Stephen (Sword of the Valiant) Weeks doesn’t bring a lot of urgency to the proceedings, which also hurts it in the late going. The finale is weak and lacks the punch of the set-up. Because it ends on a whimper instead of a bang, I hesitate to give I, Monster a full-fledged recommendation, but there’s enough bright spots here to make it worth a look for fans of Lee and Cushing.
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