TV Reviews : ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ Offers Mutant Version of Classic

“Jekyll & Hyde” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) is a mutant version of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic.

The production, shot in London, adds Michael Caine to the gallery of stars who have preceded him as the tormented doctor (notably John Barrymore, Fredric March and Spencer Tracy); we’ll ignore the several bizarre spinoffs, such as Martine Beswick in “Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde”).

Ultimately, however, all this remake does is reconfirm the 1931 March movie as untouchable.

Jekyll and Hyde buffs will not be happy with writer-director David Wickes’ script, which reduces the crucial role of the original story’s murdered prostitute to a bit part. The doctor’s obsession now is his already-married aristocratic ex-sister-in-law, who is played by Cheryl Ladd.

Caine seems a bit uncomfortable in his monstrous Hyde get-up (just as Tracy did in his 1941 film with Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner). But Ladd, in her Edwardian bustles and lush coiffures, looks regal and bedazzling, and she conveys a veiled lust for Jekyll that scandalizes London society.

But the story’s psychological eroticism is missing, and the knobby, forehead-and-knuckle-popping scenes, in which Jekyll is transformed into the bestial Hyde, are more state-of-the-art wizardry than horrific.

Rich production values, ranging from polite society to a dank Limehouse tavern and brothel, help the show. And Dr. Jekyll’s risible lecture to his medical students about “hell on Earth,” about science controlling our very shapes and intelligence, rings more frightening today than before.

A little dramatic license can be innocent enough too--the plot twist of an “Omen”-like child fathered by Dr. Jekyll, for instance. It may be hokey but by that point it doesn’t matter. But the colors are too bright, the mood too flat, the tone too stale to do justice to this great story. Where is Sister Hyde when we need her?