DR. BLACK, MR. HYDE (1976) 1/2* Watts Towers is a great setting for a monster flick finale, Johnny Pate's incidental music grooves, the bad doctor has a stylin' Rolls, and the pimp cape is very cool. Bernie Casey isn't entirely bereft of leading man attributes, but those that he does possess only dramatize the fact that the rest of the cast is worse than what you could rustle up at most bars at closing time, and that the differential still isn't enough to make Bernie credible as a brilliant medical researcher. So Bernie tries to figure out how to cure liver disease and, having only managed to kill off a single patient, tries the thing out on himself. Inexplicably it makes his face break out in flour, which even more inexplicably causes the rest of the cast to consider him a white man. Ok, so even before Michael Jackson got strange there were concerns about this sort of thing. It's terror time for hookers, anyway! No script, no acting, no effects; the only times that it's even slightly amusing is when you consider what would inspire anyone to make such a thing. There's an off-beat reference to a character named Emily Harris, but it's not clear that there's any link to the Symbianese Liberation Army. At least the corporate insect that preys on the people doesn't usually make films like this!
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