After Hammer studios had three goes at turning Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novella 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' into a movie ('The Ugly Duckling', 'The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll' & 'Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde') each time without particularly bothering with the actual story Amicus decided to have a sneaky go at it despite not actually owning the rights. To do this screenwriter (and studio head) Milton Subotsky decided to change the names of the main characters along with the title but keep most everything else the same, pretty subtle right?
In this version Freud obsessed psychiatrist Dr Charles Marlowe (Christopher Lee) invents a potion that "destroys the super-ego" rendering people either utterly docile, or competely amoral. It's not long - following two human tests and an animal one that makes this very much not a film for cat lovers - before Marlowe is testing it on himself whereupon he transforms into a grinning, psycopathic, hedonist named Edward Blake.
'I, Monster' has long had a poor reputation mostly due to it's studio bound and slightly talky script and Amicus were never at their best when parroting Hammer's gothic pretentions but with a strong central performance aided by typically solid support from a much underused Peter Cushing and some fairly bog standard support from the reliably terrible Mike Raven it's a solid enough adaptation that's perhaps slightly over-reverential of the source material making it drag a bit as he stretches the story out to fill the run time.
Buy it here UK
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