Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death (James Wood, 1979)

I don't know what I was expecting from a 1979 movie about the great-grandson of Dr. Jekyll conducting experiments in his San Francisco mansion, but I was certainly not expecting a movie that mostly consists of long stretches of exposition and lengthy karate fights between Bay Area black belts. Seriously, this movie is mostly just Dr. Jekyll explaining what he wants to do in one of the biggest, hammiest performances I've ever seen punctuated by lengthy karate fights in his basement lab. Is it terrible? Yes. Are the karate fights pretty good, though a bit repetitive? Yes. Is the movie inexplicably set in the '50s despite all the women sporting long, straight hair or Farrah Fawcett feathered layers and the men sporting afros, curly shags, and porn 'staches? Oddly, yes. Was I glad I saw it despite it being mostly terrible? Of course.

The only non-porn film directed by James Wood in his brief movie career (his other two directorial efforts are the porn flicks A Game of Love, starring The Last House on the Left's Fred Lincoln, and The $50,000 Climax Show, a porn parody of game shows with the tagline "She came to hit the jackpot!"), Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death is a mystifying attempt to marry the long-out-of-fashion mad-scientist horror flick with the much-hotter-in-'79 martial arts movie on an extremely tiny budget. The cast is small, the story makes little sense, the period details are all wrong, and no one involved in the production seems to have read more than a one-sentence synopsis of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel or any of its film or television adaptations.

Dr. Henry Jekyll (James Mathers, who also wrote the screenplay), the great-grandson of the infamous Dr. Jekyll, continues his forebear's experiments in the basement lab of his posh San Francisco home, though unlike Jekyll's original experimentation, which attempted to separate the virtue and vice that exist within us all, '79 Jekyll just wants to create an army of unstoppable killing machines to fight America's battles. 

Young Jekyll dilutes and changes Great-grandpappy Jekyll's serum to such an extent that anyone injected with the stuff becomes a mindlessly enraged vessel of ass-kicking violence who is inexplicably excellent at karate. The only experiments Jekyll ever seems to run are karate battles to the death in his spacious basement. Stupidly, his serums and test tubes are set up right next to the karate-fighting area with no barrier between, though he does have a 'fro and porn 'stache armed guard, Malo (Tom Nickelson), at the ready to shoot the winner of the karate battles, just like we did it in the '50s.

Besides Malo, Jekyll is aided in his work by his mute, deranged sister, Hilda (Nadine Kalmes), who handles the servant and housekeeping duties and is constantly bugging out her eyes to show us just how deranged she is, and his assistant, Boris (Jake Pearson), a former colleague Jekyll was insanely jealous of who suffered brain damage in an accident. Boris is a lab assistant/butler who also kidnaps all of Jekyll's test subjects, presumably from a nearby karate school.

Another former colleague, Julia Atkinson (Dawn Carver Kelly), is chained up in Jekyll's bedroom until she'll consent to falling in love with him. (Jekyll also mentions having the hots for his own sister because she looks just like his mother, but this weird incest angle is dropped shortly after it's introduced.)

Jekyll tells Julia's father, Professor Atkinson (John F. Kearney), a former teacher of Jekyll's, that his daughter was killed after being thrown from a horse. The professor arrives as a guest at Jekyll's home to attend the funeral, unaware that his daughter is still alive and that her kidnapping is a blackmail tool Jekyll is planning to use to enlist the professor's assistance in his experiments (again, the only experimentation we ever see is post-injection karate fights). Jekyll has a chip on his shoulder about the old professor. Jekyll respects the elder man's scientific prowess but blames him for being one of the instigators of Jekyll's expulsion from medical school.

What we get from all this raw material until the ridiculous conclusion is Jekyll explaining his plans to his household staff, Julia, Professor Atkinson, and no one in particular in spectacularly hammy style (you've never seen someone do so much acting with his face, and that includes heavy competition from Nadine Kalmes) in between karate fights. It's a long 92 minutes, despite the plethora of unintentional laughs and excellently choreographed fight scenes. Wood the director is no great shakes, but Wood the cinematographer is pretty good with lighting and crispness of image.

Most of the cast didn't do much in movies either before or after Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death, but, surprisingly, walking ham sandwich Mathers, making his film debut here, had a lengthy career in film, television, and theater right up to his death in 2014. He was active in San Francisco and New York theater as both an actor and a playwright, and he popped up in many bit parts and small roles in movies and TV shows, including The Right Stuff, Guilty by Suspicion, MacGyver, L.A. Law, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, ER, Ally McBeal, Me and You and Everyone We Know, and Ray Donovan. Maybe he knew exactly what kind of movie he'd written/starred in here and amplified every move by 120.

The Smiling Ghost (Lewis Seiler, 1941)

The Smiling Ghost is both a charming and silly little movie with some excellent comedic zingers and another peek into the disturbed and contradictory psyche of the average white American. A horror-comedy-mystery-romance about an aw-shucks cornpone goodie-two-shoes living beyond his means and his black valet who are taken advantage of by a decadent wealthy family in an attempt to end a murderous ghost curse afflicting a string of fiancés of the family's granddaughter, the movie accurately depicts the wealthy as selfish, demented, careless, exploitative, cold, drunk, and/or living in their own little bubble. However, its treatment of the sole black character is racist and stereotypical, using him as a wide-eyed, knee-knocking, teeth-chattering, fast-running cowardly comic relief figure who's saddled with a subplot about an elderly member of the wealthy family wanting to collect and shrink the valet's head because he doesn't yet have a "Negroid" in his collection.

Lucky Downing (Wayne Morris) is a recent college graduate and aspiring engineer in an unnamed big city, though he's the kindhearted but naive small-town rube type. He's sort of like a composite of every character on Leave It to Beaver except Eddie Haskell. Despite his intense devotion to the study of engineering, he's unemployed and hiding out in his office/apartment with his pet cat, dodging the group of bill collectors who have amassed outside his door, waiting for him to step outside. Lucky's loyal valet Clarence (Willie Best), despite not having been paid for several months, continues to help Lucky by delivering provisions and correspondence through the window awning.

Lucky finally gets to leave his abode when he's summoned to a job interview at the office of the wealthy Bentley family's attorney. Grandmother Bentley (Helen Westley) wants to hire a handsome and strong young man who's willing to do "anything legal" for a mysterious purpose. Lucky says he's their man, but the old woman puts him through the paces, barking orders at him, telling him his haircut "was an inside job," looking him up and down, and making him turn around and walk back and forth like a movie producer auditioning an aspiring actress for the casting couch. After some negotiations about retaining the valet services of Clarence, Lucky gets the job, which consists of a month's work pretending to be the fiancé of Bentley's granddaughter, the heiress Elinor Bentley Fairchild (Alexis Smith), and staying at the Bentley family mansion a few hours from the city. He will be paid $1,000 for his trouble, which gets you a half a loaf of bread in our current Trumpconomy but is nearly $23,000 in 2026 bucks. Lucky doesn't bother to ask why the family needs someone to pretend to be Elinor's fiancé because he's a city version of a hick from the sticks and he's just happy to get some cash.

After a comedic misunderstanding at the train station leaves Lucky worse for wear, he meets Elinor and newspaper reporter Lil Barstow (Brenda Marshall), who covers the Bentley family as part of her beat. Elinor breaks Lil's camera and tells Lil to send her the bill, but Lucky apologizes and attempts to answer the reporter's questions before Elinor shuts it down. Lil takes an immediate romantic liking to Lucky, but he's too simple to realize it.

Elinor's private car delivers our gang to the Bentley mansion, where Lucky meets the rest of the family. Besides Grandmother Bentley, the only family member who's in on the ruse besides Elinor, the mansion's dwellers include Elinor's aunt Rose Fairchild (Lee Patrick), an acid-tongued seen-it-all type who is quick with a dryly withering putdown and jealous of Elinor, uncle Hilton Fairchild (Roland Drew), a cold man who immediately loses interest in Lucky when he finds out Lucky doesn't have experience owning and shooting guns, cousin Tennant Bentley (Richard Ainley), an alcoholic and nasty drunk, and great-uncle Ames Bentley (Charles Halton), a demented old freak obsessed with his collection of shrunken heads. To quote a Mr. Show sketch, what a collection of assholes. Helping Clarence in his valet duties is no-nonsense butler Norton (Alan Hale). Hale's son, Alan Hale Jr., played the Skipper on Gilligan's Island. Confusing Hale Sr. for Hale Jr., I spent the whole movie thinking, "My God, this is the oldest-looking twentysomething I've ever seen." In my defense, the Hales look very much alike and I'm a dumber man than I used to be.

Why would a rich and attractive young woman like Elinor need her grandmother to pay someone to pretend to be her fiancé? Lucky may not be curious about such things, or anything not related to engineering (Elinor: "What kind of a kiss do you prefer?" Lucky: "You mean there's more than one kind?"), but after he switches rooms with Tennant and someone attempts to murder Tennant in the night, he gets the inside dope from Lil, who's sneaking around outside the mansion trying to get a scoop. Lucky was so engrossed in the study of engineering that he failed to follow the hot local news, but Elinor's family fortune isn't the only thing bringing her local fame. She's known in the press as the Kiss of Death Girl because fiancé numero uno, Johnny Eggleston, drowned. Fiancé two, Paul Myron (David Bruce), is still alive but living in an iron lung after getting his chest crushed in a car accident he claims was caused by a creepy smiling ghost. Apparently, Elinor dropped Paul like a hot potato once he was disabled. The third time was not the charm for fiancé three, Alan Winters, who died after a cobra bit him on the 18th floor of a Boston hotel. Classic 18th floor Boston shit, am I right?

Lucky is the expendable bait, hired to lure the killer, possibly entrap him, and see if Lucky will be, to quote a Bob Dylan song title, the fourth time around. When Lucky hears this inside dope (that would have been outside dope if he'd read the damn papers), he decides he's going back to (unnamed) city, he do believe he's had enough. But ain't it just like Lucky's blues, Elinor tells him she's fallen in love with him for real, and he doesn't think twice, it's alright. He decides to stick around and give this thing a shot, but will he be knockin' on heaven's door before he can even cash that thousand-dollar check? It's not dark yet, but it's getting there. Oh mercy.

All kinds of shit goes down after this, including attempted murders, midnight crypt explorations, midnight weddings, love triangles, creepy smiling ghosts, iron lung bitterness, quality wisecracks, casual racism, hidden passageways, secret caverns, surprise twists, and more. I'm halfway shocked we didn't get a guy in a gorilla suit.

So, The Smiling Ghost. Willie Best is a talented performer, but he's stuck with another dumb racist part despite getting a few good comedic lines, though he and Morris have a genuine rapport. The rest of the movie holds up a lot better. It's hardly a classic, but the one-liners are funny, the killer is creepy, and the cast is charming and has good chemistry. I can't say this is a must-watch, but it's a fascinating curio of early '40s Hollywood.