Empire Down: Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (Patreon)

Dr. Jekyll steals hormones from dead women, drinks the hormones in a glass, and grows a female alter ego: Sister Hyde.

Even by the standards of exploitation-era Hammer, this is bananas. And by bananas, I mean stupid. And by stupid, I mean wonderful. It's about a million miles away from being actually good, but fuck, man, the movie is called Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde. It could be worse than Plan 9 and still worth watching.

Sister Hyde predicts the 2010s queering up of SFF and The Silence of the Lambs in one fell swoop. It's faintly transphobic (in a very, very meaningless sense — transphobia as we know it doesn't really exist in this era), focusing as it does on a man stealing hormones from women to femme himself (although he doesn't initially kill them; he just has a supplier of young female corpses who are probably necrophiliacs). Janice Raymond would have loved this if she'd had a soul.

The thing is... it's Jekyll and Hyde with a genderbendy spin. The TERFs can't have this one. It's too weird and fun for them. And there's never a point where Jekyll's obsession with femininity is in itself unhealthy. It simply has some bizarre ideas, like femininity being the same as immortality. Does it matter that this makes less than no sense? Does it matter that Roy Ward Baker is a decidedly mid director who sort of lucked out on A Night to Remember? I'm not sure it does, because this is some delightful, tasteless bullshit. The Jack the Ripper killings, the elixir of life, a Bill Sykes-ass death for the protagonist? I cannot wait to show this dissociative piece of tranny trash to my loved ones.