Movie Reviews : Stylish but Morbid Look Hurts ‘Edge of Sanity’

“Edge of Sanity” (citywide) is an elegant, bloody new version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” reworked by writers J.P. Felix and Ron Raley to turn Hyde into Jack the Ripper.

Anthony Perkins brings just the right degree of tongue-in-cheekery to his dual role; would that director Gerard Kikoine had exercised the same restraint in showing the Ripper’s victims and had left more to the imagination. The result is a stylish, imaginative picture too morbid and graphic for mainstream audiences in its sex-and-violence juxtapositions--but one that may have enough bizarre panache to become a cult film.

Perkins’ Dr. Henry Jekyll is an eminent, upper-crust London physician who becomes the victim of an accident in his laboratory when the fumes of an anesthetic he is developing unleash in him a second personality, which he calls Jack Hyde. An opening credit sequence reveals that Jekyll is still haunted in nightmares by an especially traumatic, humiliating adolescent discovery of sex. In Hyde he will release all the twisted sexual rage he has long suppressed as a dignified, respected professional and as a devoted husband (to a lovely Glynis Barber).

Shot largely in Budapest by Tony Spratling, a gifted cinematographer, “Edge of Sanity” makes fine use of light and shadow and distorted camera angles to convey Jekyll/Hyde’s progressive mental disintegration. The film has much of the stylized, decadent look and mood of the better efforts of Italian horrormeister Dario Argento, and production designer Jean-Charles Dedieu deserves credit for his handsome settings, which range from the Jekylls’ charming period boudoir to a lurid red-and-gold bordello that would have delighted the Marquis de Sade (and probably Oscar Wilde as well).

For all its fine sense of time and place, “Edge of Sanity” has a highly contemporary arid tone, finding dark amusement rather than pathos in the predicament of the pompous, very proper Victorian Dr. Jekyll, and Perkins’ Jekyll/Hyde is as outrageous as he is tormented. The bravura of his dual portrayal is much like his performance as the sexually obsessed priest in Ken Russell’s flamboyant “Crimes of Passion.” It can’t be denied that “Edge of Sanity” (rated R) has the courage of its kinky material, but all the same: Let the buyer beware.