Konterr Brilliant and touching

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Caryl It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Rainey Dawn This one is bad, corny and lame enough to be fun for me. Since when was Mr. Hyde ever a werewolf-vampire hybrid? Since this film of course! Dr. Lomas was a colleague of Dr. Jekyll and has been watching over Jekyll's estate and promise he can live there as long as he would like. Janet Smith and her soon to be husband George Hastings arrives at the mansion to learn that she has inherited the estate and money but is also told a dark secret - that she is the daughter of Dr. Jekyll. Now that she's learned who her father really is, she suddenly believes that it's hereditary and develops a madness with her nightmares and beliefs. But is it only her nightmare and beliefs or is she really transforming and killing the people turning up dead? 6/10

martinflashback Ulmer must have dug deep to find a script this simple. Behind the daffy dialog, he clutters up his frame with all manner of junk, diligently waded through by the admirably serious actors The picture really drowns in brick a brac and set ornament, in tea cups, foam relief, fire places, fake gravestones, so on infinitely. Most of this is shot from the hip, giving the strange impression that Agar and Talbot are themselves moving furniture or hand- puppets, their secret hidden by the puppet stage floor. Every so often great mists are rolled out, lap dissolves and wipes erase or shift figures in time, and people dash through pasteboard sets shot at frightening angles. All of these effects are sequenced in a mongoloid semi- plot which moves heedlessly and energetically along like a hypnotic piece of music from Mars. Two of the best ecstatic sequences: a murder, with a memorable use of the phone, deliriously edited as if it were a Leger, and a chase over the moors at the hour of the wolf which marries tin pot Gothic to the feel of newsreel documentary. These haunting fits of grand mal guignol attack the ludicrous plot and scheme of the film, jarring the etiquette of the B- film programmer and loosing a manic poetic force on the five-and-dime proceedings. At the end, we are told the whole Carrollian thing is a just a joke, in a sort of low- rent Pirandellan bookend which makes the unreal reality of Ulmer's ecstatic rides all the more inscrutable. He certainly chose to make films like this, subordinating plot, dialog, and anything else by then considered crucial to the whole film to the giddy trapeze- swing of a perpetually moving modernism. Ulmer can't sit still. People talk about auteur films. 'Daughter of Dr. Jekyll' is far more auteur than any of the recognized 'masters'. Ulmer accepts the necessity of whatever idiotic limitation the script and budget entails and wends his way around them, through them, past them. That's why he had his say in the set design, lighting: the details excited him.... The script is irrelevant, a too- literary artifact that would one day become extinct. Ulmer made films in Yiddish, a language he didn't understand, and also movies for a black audience, both markets that were at the margins of the popular cinematic experience. Naturally, he embraced pulp horror and science fiction, a far more hospitable place for his expressionist art than the middle- brow armpit sweat of the heavy message movie. A foreigner, this is the corner where he was most at home. This Jekyll's kid film would make a good double bill with 'Meshes of the Afternoon', another fantasy of objects and mirrors that unfolds in the lunacy of the broad daylight.

gftbiloxi Edgar G. Ulmer began his career as a set designer to the famous theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt; by 1920 he was working in films, and although often uncredited labored on such legendary films as Fritz Lang's DIE NIBELUNGEN and METROPOLIS. By 1927 he was in Hollywood, and set design work led to assignments as a director. In 1934 Ulmer brought the full force of his talents upon Universal's THE BLACK CAT--a brilliantly realized film that many consider among the finest horror films of that decade. But Ulmer's affair with script girl Shirley Castle, wife of a studio executive, resulted not only in his termination at Universal but placed him on an industry-wide blacklist as well. He would never work at a major studio again.But Ulmer had a knack for getting the most out of a tiny budget, and he soon found himself in demand as a director at second-string studios and for independent productions. Between his dismissal from Universal in 1934 and his death in 1972 he would direct more than forty films, and he was often noted for his ability to bring a remarkable artistic vision to the screen in spite of low budgets and questionable casts.All that said, the 1957 DAUGHTER OF DR. JEKYLL was, according to daughter Arianne, a project undertaken for the sake of a paycheck; it is far from Ulmer's most memorable. Even so, as 1950s B-horror flicks go, it is far from the worst--in spite of tenth-rate special effects Ulmer manages to endow the movie with an entertaining atmosphere and the occasional jab of humor, and it is considerably more coherent than most of its kind.The story concerns orphaned Janet Smith (Gloria Talbott), who has now reached her twenty-first birthday and arrives at the home of her guardian Dr. Lomas (Arthur Shields.) She brings with her future husband George Hastings (John Agar), who soon wins Dr. Lomas' approval, and all seems pleasant. But Janet is in for a surprise: Dr. Lomas tells her that she is heiress to the estate, left to her by her father, the notorious Dr. Jekyll, and no sooner is Janet in residence than corpses begin to crop up. Has she somehow inherited her father's chemically-induced evil? The script here is extremely transparent, and you'll know what's going on long before Janet does. It is also more than a little odd, managing to wrap ideas about vampires and werewolves into the whole Dr. Jekyll package. Add to this extremely obvious miniatures awash in dry ice, mediocre special effects, and a cast that tends toward the obvious at every possible turn--well, the overall effect is somewhat hooty, to say the least.THE DAUGHTER OF DR. JEKYLL will never rank along side the likes of Ed Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE in the "so bad it's good" cult movie derby--Ulmer is too much of an artist to permit tipsy tombstones--but it is actually amusing in its low-rent efforts. Recommended to fans of the genre.GFT, Amazon Reviewer

MARIO GAUCI This is a low-grade horror film which has been culted into a reputation beyond its worth because of its director's involvement. The plot is strikingly similar to that of another notorious potboiler - SHE-WOLF OF London (1946) - but, at least, here the monster is seen (albeit ineffectively made-up): despite the titular reference, the script pays little to no credit to previous cinematic incarnations of the R.L. Stevenson novella - opting, instead, to indiscriminately incorporate elements of lycanthropy and vampirism which make no sense at all...but which lend the film value as a unique curio and one which, in view of its sheer audacity, it is difficult to hate (indeed, the whole misguided enterprise reminded me of the contemporaneous FRANKENSTEIN 1970 [1958])! Despite the ultra-cheap production, the film makes the most of its foggy atmosphere and the hallucination sequences are effective in a naïve sort of way. Casting is below-par but, at least, Arthur Shields (who also appears in a silly book-end in full monster make-up - but, then, as Gloria Talbott's legal guardian spends the rest of the film trying to convince her that she is the werewolf!!) and John Dierkes (as a particularly vehement believer in the Jekyll 'legend' despite being in their employ - or, so it seems, since he's always hovering about the estate!) enter gleefully into the spirit of the thing.I had been toying with the idea of purchasing the All Day DVD of this one ever since it was released; I'm glad I managed to catch up with it eventually without having to purchase the disc - being shown on late-night Italian TV, as part of a Jekyll & Hyde marathon which included snippets from a variety of films based on the venerable tale (I was especially gratified by the inclusion of a couple of scenes from Jean Renoir's THE TESTAMENT OF DR. CORDELIER [1959], which I've been yearning to see forever, and also ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE [1953], which I haven't watched in ages - I really ought to get down to purchasing either the R1 or R2 DVD releases of the films featuring the comic duo!)...