I, MONSTER (1971)
Curly fries. I treated myself to a generous portion of curly fries directly before viewing this film. And that, dear reader, may have been a mistake. My night turned into a contentious battle between grease and I, Monster. I would say that Christopher Lee and company carried the day, even if my eyelids did grow heavier than granite helicopters (???). Right, so this is an Amicus reworking of Robert Louis Stephenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Names have been changed to protect the fictional. Actually, I don't know why the names were changed, but regardless, Christopher Lee plays the erudite Dr. Marlowe. He is experimenting with a formula that seemingly transposes your personality. Or something to that effect. He uses his patients as guinea pigs (he's a psychologist by trade), which is an interesting wrinkle that I haven't seen in other variants on the Jekyll/Hyde dynamic.
Eventually, he injects himself with the frightening pharmaceutical. And if he had done it just the one time, he would have escaped from his dummy run unscathed. But of course, he returns for repeat business, and the effects of the stimulant intensify with each dose. It probably won't surprise you that I, Monster has a conspicuous Universal vibe to it. Make-up is relatively minimal. That allows for Lee to act his brains out. The cast also includes Peter Cushing, so yay. I wish they had more scenes together, but I'll take what I can get. I, Monster is visually fetching. Director Stephen Weeks uses a lot of crooked camera angles to accentuate the mood. Ironically, Hammer issued their own take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a decade earlier. In my opinion, this is the better flick, but you have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate it. In other words, put down the curly fries.
No comments:
Post a Comment