Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes; Doctor Jekyll and His Women; The Bloodbath of Doctor Jekyll

DIRECTED BY: Walerian Borowczyk

FEATURING: Udo Kier, Marina Pierro, Patrick Magee, Gérard Zalcberg

PLOT: Dr. Jekyll throws an engagement party in his mansion, and the guests soon find themselves dying to leave.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Although it has its deliciously decadent moments and is probably the strangest version of the Jekyll and Hyde story, it’s more of a second tier weird movie. It is recommended only for fans of Eurotrashy artsploitation features.

COMMENTS: Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osborne starts off slowly, with seemingly endless dinner conversation and a long (if fetishistic) dance by a teenage ballerina, so that you may feel you’ve been cheated and that maybe this isn’t the perverted Freudian freakshow the ad copy promised. Flash-forwards to snippets from the coming night’s brutal debaucheries keep hope alive. Fortunately, about a third of the way through Patrick Magee starts blindly firing his pistol, virgins are despoiled, a father is tied up while Hyde (and his oversize prosthetic member) violates his daughter before his very eyes, and Jekyll is writhing in a bathtub full of filthy, rusty water (no director outside the porn world requires as much writing of his actors as does Borowczyk). Soon enough, Jekyll’s maiden fiancee, Miss Osborne, catches onto the fact that her hubby is able to transform into the well-hung Hyde several times a night, and finds herself intrigued by the idea.

Jekyll/Osborne continues Borowczyk’s obsession with the notion that human beings are just a few flimsy bourgeois notions away from bloody rutting animals, although this movie does not exploit that idea as explicitly and audaciously as in his Certified Weird atrocity, The Beast. Despite the explicit nature of the film, the relocation of the action to a single night in a single house, and the crucial infusion of female sexual energy in the person of Jekyll’s fiancee, this adaptation does legitimately capture the sense of Victorian rot and the dualist tensions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original story, while at the same time being a revolutionary erotic expansion of it. Fanny Osborne was the name of Stevenson’s real-life fiancee (and later wife), who, according to Stevenson, encouraged the author to burn the first draft of “Dr. Jekyll” for being too sensationalist and not allegorical enough. Borowczyk originally marketed the film as being an adaptation of that lost first draft which he claimed to have uncovered, but later admitted the story was made up.

With this film Udo Kier became, to my knowledge, the only actor to portray Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll.

In 2015 Arrow Video released a shockingly lavish DVD/Blu-ray combination version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osborne. This virtually unknown movie gets its own Criterion-style booklet of essays and a host of extras. The DVD architecture even resembles a Criterion edition, right down to the style of the short prose introductions before the special features. The most substantial extra features are Borowczyk’s slyly naughty 1979 short “Happy Toy” and the experimental tribute film “Himorogi.”There is also a commentary track fashioned from interview segments with various people who worked on the film, as well as over an hours worth of interviews and analysis with stars Kier and Pierro and others. Fans of the director will consider this a must-buy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“….a film of strange and outrageous beauty that seems to emanate from that place where our fears are also desires.”–Chris Preachment, Time Out (contemporaneous)