Looking like something that the bat threw up, veteran character Oliver Reed guess one of the worst and unfunniest performance of the 1980's. In fact, had it not been for the 1982 bomb horror comedy "Jekyll and Hyde Together Again", read might have actually been at the top of the worst. This has one Saving Grace over that one. This one directly to cable TV rather than getting a theatrical release, while the other one was fully released where it was born and promptly croaked. I guess Cannon films in one of their earliest efforts realized they couldn't get away with something this bad, and why start your run out of "Hollywood's Gate" with something this hideous. While Reed is a good dramatic actor, when he's doing drama, when he has been in the occasional comedy, t's worked because he wasn't trying to be funny, and here he tries too hard, bombing faster than the conclusion of "Dr. Strangelove".

A physically deformed physician at a rather wacky medical facility, Reed a patient's who aren't actually looking at him when they go into the office and scream in horror when they finally look up and see him. The other doctor in the facility treats heavyset women with a procedure that makes them lose weight immediately, but they walk out of the office with lemon puckered lips. Reed is experimenting with drugs to change his appearance, and when he succeeds, he turns into a handsome but murderous buffoon who accidentally kills the women he's trying to lose his virginity with. That results a bunch of unfunny slapstick scenes where all the women die in cartoonish ways. His efforts to pick them up make him look even more like a lunatic than before.

This is a type of film where the audience asks, "Is this for real?" I sat there like the audience in "The Producers" with my mouth agape, stunned that anybody who had seen any of the Mel Brooks parodies could even think this was remotely funny. The ensemble is collectively wretched, and the script is up there with "Slapstick of Another Kind" as one of the worst of the 80's. Good comedy certainly isn't hard because a lot of it is rotten. The only hype I can recommend about this is that audiences who dare to even make an effort to watch this will be running out of there faster than the guy whose feet Dr. Hype wants to cut off.

Charles B. Griffith - the Quentin Tarantino-named "Father of Redneck Cinema" - is credited with 29 movies but he probably wrote plenty more. From 1955 to 1961, he was Roger Corman's main screenwriter, starting with two unfilmed Westerns (Three Bright Banners and Hangtown) and moving on to an uncredited rewrite on It Conquered the World and his first credit Gunslinger. He went on to make Not of This Earth, The Flesh and the Spur, The Undead, Teenage Doll, Naked Paradise, Attack of the Crab Monsters and Rock All Night before making two movies - Ghost of the China Sea and Forbidden Island - for Columbia (which didn't go well).

Griffith reunited with Corman after and really went into the prime of his career of making movies, writing stuff like Beast from the Haunted Cave, Ski Troop Attack, The Little Shop of Horrors, A Bucket of Blood, Creature from the Haunted Sea and many, many more.

His films rank among some of my favorites of all time - The Wild Angels, Death Race 2000, rewrites on Barbarella - and he went on to direct, act and - as all must in the 80s - work for Cannon Films.

Beyond a script Cannon tried for years to get made - Oy Vey, My Son Is Gay - Griffith made this movie, which started as part of a series of joke movie titles that he shared with Francis Ford Coppola at a Christmas party. He showed them to Menahem Golan - half of all things Cannon - and after writing The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington didn't work out, Griffith made up a story to go with the title, all about a hippie who creates a drug that makes anyone that takes it into an ad exec. Golan bought it, as long as the ugly guy became the good guy.

In typical Cannon fashion, Griffith had three weeks to write and do preproduction, four weeks to shoot and two weeks to edit. Then, as always, the rug was pulled out Cannon style: They wanted Oliver Reed. Great actor. Maybe not a comedic actor.

Griffith told Sense of Cinema, "Heckyl and Hype could have been a very good picture. Oliver was great as Heckyl. Wonderful. He played the part with a kind of New York accent and everything, but when he was Hype, he didn't know how to do it... Reed played Hype as Oliver Reed, slow and ponderous."

It's a good looking movie, but man, it's a movie that has no idea what it wants to be. Kind of like Cannon at the time, which had just been bought by two Israeli madmen who were about to take the small New York studio and make it into something so much bigger than it was supposed to be. But that's a story for another time. Check back in March.

Given that this movie was a production of the Cannon film company (one of my favorite studios),I searched for a way to find this movie for many years, but I couldn't find it anywhere. The recent news that the movie was getting a Blu-Ray release thrilled me until I found out that I would have to pay an arm and a leg for a copy of the limited release. But I decided to see if it was on YouTube, and I found it there... and I'm really glad that I didn't pay ANY money to see it! There are many ways the movie goes wrong, but the main reasons are due to its script. The central narrative is sometimes very rambling, as if the writers were making things up as they went along. A bigger problem, however, is that except for a couple of chuckles, the comedy simply isn't funny at all. The movie often seems afraid of going after really big laughs, and instead tries to be mildly "cute" most of the time in a manner that seems out of a movie made 20 or 30 years earlier. Actor Oliver Reed tries his best, but even he seems to be befuddled by the lame material and the half-hearted direction. By the way, while the movie got an "R" rating at the time, by today's standards it is quite tame, and would get a "PG-13" rating at most today.