DR BLACK AND MR HYDE aka DECISION FOR DOOM; DR BLACK AND MR WHITE; THE WATTS MONSTER
USA. 1975. Director - William Crain, Screenplay - Larry LeBron, Idea - Lawrence Woolner, Producer - Charles Walker, Photography - Tak Fujimoto, Music - Johnny Pate, Special Effects - Harry Wollman, Hyde Makeup - Stan Winston, Makeup - Zoltan Elek, Art Direction - Tommy Estridge. Production Company - Hyde Productions. Bernie Casey (Dr Henry Pride), Marie O'Henry (Linda Monte), Rosalind Cash (Dr Billie Worth), Ji-Tu Cumbuka (Lieutenant Jackson), Milt Kogan (Lieutenant Harry O'Connor), Stu Gilliam (Silky)
Plot: Eminent Black doctor Henry Pride is trying to find a cure for liver disease. He injects himself with the serum he creates but this transforms him into a psychopathic white-skinned monster that goes on a spree killing prostitutes.
Following the popularity of `Shaft' (1971) which was the first action film to feature a Black hero, there was, in what has been nicknamed the Blaxploitation fad, a swarm of film-makers who raced to exploit the new market, offering up traditional action films but featuring principally Black protagonists and characters. Amongst these came the entrepreneurial `Blacula' (1972) and `Blackenstein' (1973), jumping on the trend to adapt classic horror stories with Black twists. And after that, one supposed that `Dr Black and Mr Hyde' was fairly inevitable.
Like `Blacula' and `Blackenstein', `Dr Black and Mr Hyde' is a B-exploitation film, passably well made. But while neither `Blacula' and `Blackenstein' are any more than that, `Dr Black' has an undeniable metaphoric anger to it. Of all the Blaxploitation reworkings of classic horror themes, `Dr Black' is the only one to revamp the metaphors of the original story rather than simply recast the story in Black face. Where Robert Louis Stevenson wrote `Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' as a pre-Freudian psychological study in the rift between man's baser drives and the veneer of civilization he is forced to adopt, `Dr Black' rewrites it into a metaphor for the Black and White racial divide. On the Dr Jekyll side it sets up Bernie Casey as the kind-hearted Black doctor Pride who, in having won success and acclaim, is accused of "really being white" and having forgotten his ghetto ethnicity. And when he takes the potion and literally transforms into a white man, the result is an hysterically paranoid and exaggerated demonization of a white man that might have emerged from someone's deepest darkest racial nightmares. (It is probably the most brutish and animalistic of all the Mr Hyde characterizations that have ever been conducted). Beneath the film looms this deeply afraid (and undeniably racist) racial animosity born out of the ghetto - the fear for Black identity; the belief that to sell out one's ghetto roots is to become White; that to be White is truly monstrous - that manages to play with considerably more potency than a good many serious liberal films about racism. And the result is a metaphor of the racial divide that is conducted with a striking and unremitting ferocity that quite belies the exploitation film it is embedded in.
Screening at the Christchurch 1998 Incredibly Strange Film Festival Reviewed by Richard Scheib
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