Although Cannon Films' filmography of exploitation continued well into the 1980s, they hit the bottom of the barrel early on with DR. HECKYL AND MR. HYPE, on Blu-ray from Scorpion Releasing.

Dr. Henry Heckyl (Oliver Reed, THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF) is a monstrously ugly man – prosthetic effects courtesy of Steve Neill (FRIGHT NIGHT) – who is best tolerated beneath the feet of his patients as a podiatrist and lives for his daily sightings of beautiful Coral Coreen (the tragic Sunny Johnson, FLASHDANCE) at the bus stop every morning. Henry attempts to kill himself with a pair of hedge clippers but he thinks he would best spare humanity his ugly visage with a overdose of a chemical paste developed by colleague Dr. Vince Hinkle (Mel Welles, LADY FRANKENSTEIN) which has successfully melted away the fat cells of a number of Hinkle's heaviest clients and, Heckyl hopes, will erase him from existence entirely. The paste fails to kill him, melting away his ugliness instead and revealing a debonair alter ego with a British accent who soon adopts the name Mr. Hype. He finds that he attracts women easily, but turns into a psychopathic "ladykiller" when they fail to appreciate his beauty. Naturally, Coral is put off by Hype's crude come-ons and he wants to kill her, but Heckyl will not let him and he discovers that she tentatively returns his affections when he changes back. The rejection of other women, however, and the belief that Coral could never really love him are too much to resist another dose of the paste, but Hype's charms cannot fool his colleagues – including accutickling therapist Dr. Lew Hoo (Kedrick Wolf, THE GRANNY) and receptionist Miss Finebum (Maia Danziger, THE KIRLIAN WITNESS) – or flat-footed detective Lieutenant Mack Druck (Virgil Frye, GRADUATION DAY) who think that Hype is more of a "monster" that Heckyl.

Scripted and directed by Roger Corman associate Charles B. Griffith (LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS) – and possibly an abandoned Filmgroup or New World project if IMDb is right about citing Corman as an uncredited writer – but greenlighted by Cannon Films, DR. HECKYL AND MR. HYPE might have qualified as an interesting take on the Robert Louis Stevenson source story a la the later Anthony Perkins vehicle EDGE OF SANITY had the Griffith film been any good. The idea of a hint of misogyny born of reactions of his ugliness seething beneath Hecklyl's general bitterness and unleashed by Hype as his own insecurity over the skin deepness of his charms might have been more meaningful had the film taken a more serious approach; or, the murders might have left less of a bad taste with the viewer had any of the jokes been remotely funny. From punny names like hooker Liza Rowne (Denise Hayes, UP FROM THE DEPTHS) and nurses Pertbottom, Lushtush, Rosenrump, and Talltale to desperate interjections of humor from Welles' Yiddish accent, Reed's own attempts to adapt a comic persona (some bits of tap dancing seem left over from the original intention to cast Dick Van Dyke in the lead), and the orchestral scoring of Richard Band (THE ALCHEMIST) badgering the viewer, everything falls flat as the film just lumbers on. The cameos of Corman-regular Dick Miller (THE HOWLING), Cannon-regular Yehuda Efroni (THE DELTA FORCE), Tony Cox (SPACEBALLS), and THE ADDAMS FAMILY's Jackie Coogan are far less puzzling than a guest appearance by Lucretia Love (THE ARENA) as another prostitute. The most interesting aspect of the film is the photography of Robert Primes (LOVELY BUT DEADLY) which spikes foggy night shots worthy of a straight telling of Jekyll and Hyde with saturated red and blue gels. The film's non-Heckyl make-up effects are an early credit for John Carl Buechler (TROLL).