You know you’re in for a weird time when the opening credits of a film roll over blood-dripping wall covered in depictions of famous psychopaths as a portentous narration drones in the background. One of the rarest, most obscure slashers out there, The Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio only ever received a limited VHS release in Australia of all places. Now Vinegar Syndrome have unleashed it upon an unsuspecting world, and it turns out to be a great deal stranger than I ever expected.
Perhaps the best way to describe it is to say: imagine a more competently shot Andy Milligan film, minus the charm. Which seems like a fairly damning description, but Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio has a demented charm all of its own. Based around a police investigation at a secluded nursing hospital where a grisly death recently occurred, the plot mainly finds excuses to toss as many red herrings at the audience as humanly possible, as the occasional slashing takes place to liven things up without any of the characters seeming to notice that people are dying until the last 15 minutes. In the meantime there’s plenty of sex and weirdness, most notably a pair of particularly gory and lengthy frog dissection scenes. Amazingly, despite a higher budget and competent collaborators, director Eric Jeffrey Haims manages to do a poorer job of creating a period setting than Milligan ever did. Everything just feels oddly fake.
The primary joy here is the dialogue and character interactions, all of which are so joyfully ludicrous I found myself lapsing into fits of giggles on several occasions. The actors are all commendably game but mostly incompetent, the only real standout being porn starlet Rene Bond, who’s just great to watch in pretty much anything. Here she gets to dress in drag and pretend to whip a busty cohort, which is a particularly odd joy to watch. The photography can mostly be described as competent, with a few colourful flourishes to liven things up here and there. I’m rather glad I never hunted down a bootleg of the old VHS, all of the nice compositions would have been totally destroyed. All in all though, the one thing that really lingers in the mind about Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio is the last 30 seconds. The last 30 seconds are one of the strangest, most utterly demented things I’ve seen in a very long time. Even if you never want to watch the film itself, you should try and find a way to see the epilogue, it really is weird enough to be well worth your time.
(Watched via Vinegar Syndrome Blu-Ray.)
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