27th December 2016, 04:21 PM
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 | Cult King Cult Labs Radio Contributor
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 Decemberdike # 22
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981)
What an odd beast Walerian Borowczyk's film is. This take on Louis Stevenson's classic and oft filmed novel seems to want to be many things but doesn't really convince in any of them.
Clearly at source it's a horror film and the final third produces much in this respect as does the opening with it's girl being stalked along foggy London streets scenario, it's also a classic old dark house thriller as it pits a group of people together over one night with a killer on the loose.
It's the film's other aspects which confuse. Walerian Borowczyk isn't a horror director, he's an arthouse director and he brings these flourishes to this productio. Be it the over lit scenes which look as though the screen has a smear of Vaseline across it or framing from odd angles like behind half closed doors or lingering his camera on objects for longer than is necessary.
As the film was made in 1981 (or at least released at that time) it also seems influenced by bawdy British sex comedies (witness many breasts popping out of basques and so forth) which had by this time died a death but were still doing the rounds at the flea pit cinemas, except Borowczyk takes it further by adding almost hardcore elements to it and have Mr. Hyde rape his victims to death, and finally there's Patrick Magee's hideous over acting which often made me cringe.
The sad thing is when all these elements come together as one, the finished product is more on the lines of Vernon Sewell's Burke and Hare (1972) - Haphazard campy nonsense - than it is a classic Gothic horror of the time.
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