JEKYLL AND HYDE TOGETHER AGAIN (1982)
Notes: Paramount, 87 minutes.
Dr. Henry Jekyll/Mr. Hyde: Mark Blankfield
Mary Carew: Bess Armstrong
Ivy: Krista Errickson
Dr. Knute Lanyon: Tim Thomerson
Nurse: Cassandra Peterson
Directed: Jerry Belson
Written: Monica Mcgowan Johnson
Summary: At Our Lady of Pain and Suffering Hospital, Dr. Daniel Jekyll performs what he insists is his last surgical operation, even though the richest man in the world, Hubert Howes, needs a total transplant of everything. Jekyll wants to devote himself to research into ways humans can make themselves well, to replace surgery with drugs (hooray!). Dr. Carew, Jekyll’s prospective father-in-law, is displeased.
At the charity ward where peasants beg for “more swill, please,” fiancee Mary Carew visits. Against Jekyll’s wishes, she has applied for a $500,000 grant on his behalf. Meanwhile, his lab mice have committed suicide. Jekyll is unnerved by a patient, Ivy, who works at a club. He falls asleep at his lab table and accidentally sniffs some powder. He transforms into a frizzy-haired sleazeball, growing gold chains, a gold tooth, and jewelry. Taking some powder with him, he becomes a driving menace and goes to Madame Woo Woo’s, part Asian restaurant and part slam-dancing nightclub. Ivy sings; they go to her spartan room. She asks his name and says, “You don’t have to hide anything from me.” Hence his adopted name. Jekyll wakes up to a well-furnished room and a pile of bills for kinky supplies. He rushes to the horse academy to assure Mary he loves her. Then in his beat-up car to the hospital where a testicle donor visits Howes.
Jekyll can’t bring himself to flush the powder. He sniffs some and rushes out, mooning a nun on the way. He chases after Ivy in a stolen ambulance and finds her in a grocery store. He rushes her out, though they have 11 items, and she gets into his “van.” Jekyll wakes up between two pairs of feet. He rushes to Mary, who is reading Little Women in her bedroom. She tells him he missed a veal dinner. They head towards the bed but her father enters with a shotgun, but is fine when Jekyll says he is agreeing to perform the Howes surgery.
Jekyll tries to flush the potion again, but Carew does to hurry him along to the O.R. Jekyll starts transforming involuntarily in the O.R. and flings a tray of labelled organs, running off crazed. The organs are unusable so Carew offers himself. Lanyon is in the middle of a breast augmentation procedure when Jekyll rants incoherently. Lanyon shows that he too is weird and likes to wear women’s underware to the office. The breast augmentation goes way too far but the woman is happy.
Hyde wants money for more drugs and finds that Jekyll won the grant. Elated, he goes to find Ivy again, this time at Funland, an arcade. She’s playing Pac-Man and he messes her up, insulting Jekyll but also telling her, “I am the doctor.” He goes berserk when she’s playing a car-race game. She gets fried electrically and is angry.
Jekyll stows away on a plane, and Ivy takes a train to England where the awards ceremony is to be held. “The Queen” is the presenter, a gay man. Mary and Lanyon await Jekyll, but George Chakiris accepts the award before Hyde enters dramatically, desperate for the last trace of the drug. He steals the show, offering shtick stand-up. Regarding Jekyll, “I kid him a lot because we’re very close.” He introduces the musical portion of our show and sings the manic, “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide,” eventually stripping too. A mob chases him off, and he finds himself in black-and-white, stealing a cane and knocking over a pram. He tries to escape to the rooftops but, among the pursuers, Ivy shoot him and he falls to the street. He transforms back to Jekyll while Ivy and Mary vie for whose he was. But he wakes up, claiming he can belong to neither since he is essentially split in two. “Isn’t everybody?” asks Lanyon, hooking up with The Queen. Ivy and Mary decide they can work this out and both drag him off, past Robert Louis Stevenson’s grave, where the skeleton is spinning.
Commentary: Oy.