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.