Blu-ray Review: Gérard Kikoïne’s Edge of Sanity on Arrow Video

By the time of Edge of Sanity’s release in 1989, seemingly countless adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had been made, so the need to infuse fresh blood into the material was paramount. One obvious means to do so was to ratchet up the sex and violence, which was in keeping with the m.o. of exploitation producer Harry Alan Towers. The filmmakers also mashed up the story with broad-strokes elements drawn from the Ripper murders, even though that had already been done, at least once, in Hammer’s Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. But Gérard Kikoïne’s film has more on its mind than the lowest common denominator. What you actually get here is a stylish, albeit gonzo, little shocker that has as much to say about the 1980s as it does the 1880s.

Edge of Sanity opens with a delirious depiction of what Sigmund Freud called the primal scene, wherein young Henry Jekyll witnesses a man who may well be his father getting busy with a young maid in the barn. When the man’s precocious act of prurience is discovered, it leads to the boy receiving a sound whipping with a riding crop, combined with the unsettling vision of the woman’s face covered in blood. This, in turn, proves to be a dream of the adult Dr. Jekyll (Anthony Perkins). With this opening gambit, the film explicitly locates the source of his proclivities when he turns into Hyde in a primordial fixation on sex and violence.

The film’s emphasis on the duality of Jekyll and Hyde carries over into its formal aspects. Hyde’s escapades are shot in a bravura style, replete with canted angles, gaudy gel lighting, and expressionistic use of shadows. (The filmmakers also introduce oddly anachronistic costume details that seem inspired by Madonna, like one sex worker’s “BOY” belt buckle.) Conversely, Jekyll’s world is shot in a locked-down fashion reliant on long and medium shots. It consists of all burnished wood and tasteful bric-a-brac, with the sole exception of his white-tiled laboratory, which suggests something out of Ken Russell’s The Devils. Nor does the Russell connection end there. Perkins’s distinctive presence and hothouse florid acting as Hyde point back to his involvement in Crimes of Passion as a demented reverend.

In a clever nod to contemporary culture, Jekyll’s transformations into Hyde are triggered by his accidental invention of crack cocaine. Hyde even goes around town toking on his crack pipe, eventually offering it to a sex worker (Sarah Maur Thorp) and her tout (Ben Cole), who form an increasingly unhinged ménage à trois with him that’s founded on equal-opportunity S&M. Their relationship stands in direct contrast to his staid, practically platonic relations with his social worker wife, Elisabeth (Glynis Barber). True to Stevenson’s tale, Jekyll merges more and more with his Hyde persona, until he doesn’t even need the drugs to make the change. At one point, he interrupts some particularly stuffy dinner conversation only to extol the Nietzschean pursuit of the individual will without regard to societal conventions. It’s not such a far cry from Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” speech in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.

These elements introduce a fruitful ambivalence that runs throughout Edge of Sanity. For all that it wants, at least on the surface, to plead for “just say no” and other moral platitudes, it’s no coincidence that the amoral world of Hyde is far more compellingly rendered. In this regard, the film is a companion piece of sorts to Walerian Borowczyk’s incendiary The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, in which both Jekyll and his fiancée undergo a final transformation into their “better selves,” only to abscond from the scene of their many crimes while caught up in a state of frenzied ecstasy. Edge of Sanity doesn’t go quite that far, contenting itself with a more sober, yet still slyly subversive, twist ending.

Image/Sound

Arrow’s 1080p transfer of Edge of Sanity, made from a 4K scan of the original camera negative, looks really sensational. The livid reds of the brothel sequences and the icy blues that predominate during several of the murders really stand out, while the deep blacks of the expressionistic shadow-play look entirely uncrushed. Fine details of the period décor and costumes (period and otherwise) are clearly discernible. The English 2.0 LPCM track is a workhorse, cleanly delivering dialogue as well as Frédéric Talgorn’s lush, elegant score.

Extras

The commentary track by writer David Flint and filmmaker Sean Hogan is consistently engaging, detailing Edge of Sanity’s production history, relating it to other Jekyll and Hyde films, parsing the Ripper elements in the story, suggesting contemporary influences, and lamenting its underwhelming critical reception. Also of note is the two-part interview with director Gérard Kikoïne, the first part covering his early work making “love films” (i.e., soft- and hardcore erotic films), and the second zeroing in on his involvement with producer Harry Alan Towers on several earlier projects and experiences working on Edge of Sanity.

The extras are rounded out by a trailer and series of other interviews: producer Edward Simons talks about the casting process and shooting The Edge of Sanity largely on location in Budapest; the always reliable musician and critic Stephen Thrower discusses the film’s deliberate anachronisms, its thematic similarities to Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion, and its notable aesthetic aspects; and Ripper expert Dr. Clare Smith fascinatingly lays out the complex interrelations between the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s source novel in 1886, the debut of Sherlock Holmes in 1887, and the Ripper murders in 1888.

Overall

Gérard Kikoïne’s Edge of Sanity is a luridly stylized and slyly subversive adaptation of the Jekyll and Hyde story, and it receives a handsome package from Arrow Video.