Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

Rating:
Summary: Redfield's Performance
Review: All I can say is that Redfield plays Jekyll and Hyde like no one has since Fredric March! Brilliant! The interesting spin on his version of the character(s) is that Hyde is possibly the true self and that Jekyll was always a mask. His twisted, wild eyed, dwarfish, satyr-like Hyde is truer to Stevenson's description than the hairy ape/wolf-man that people usually associate with the character. He plays Hyde with an almost comical glee, similar to March's performance. Evil can be humorous in a twisted ironic way. Script-wise it follows the original story closer than any film before it. We don't find out until toward the end that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. But there were some surprising and unnecessary deviations from the story. For example, Sir Danvers has a son (?!) who Hyde kills instead of him (taking much of the horror away from the story as his son is almost as odious as Hyde. You're glad he gets killed), Hyde kills his mistress' lover instead of her, he reveals his secret to Dr. Lanyon's assistant instead of him, and a gun inexplicably explodes in hyde's hand maiming him (I'm still trying to figure out why this was put in the story) just to name a few. Also this film is one of the lowest budgeted modern indi films I've ever seen. The streets of London are miniatures with the actors cheaply superimposed upon them. It seems all the money went into making Mr. Hyde's excellent makeup, that they had to go and use cheap, $3.00 Halloween beards and moustache's that neither looked remotely real or even matched the actors hair color. It would have been better to leave the actors clean shaven. And Sir Danvers's snobbish son... with a modern gelled crew-cut?! Although the acting is forced at times, and downright bad at others, for the most part it's decent. Redfield's acting however is exceptional. Yes, I recommend sitting through the faker than fake beards, zero budget not-so-special fx, and bad acting just to see this guy play Jekyll & Hyde. It's truly inspired! Enough for me to give the film 4 stars. Plus it's a cheap DVD, so what do you have to lose?