“With Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a new stab at Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic saga of good versus evil, Baltimore writer/producer/director/actor Mark Redfield has crafted one of the most unique B-horror movies in recent memory, a full-on sophisticated costume drama with a true sense of abject terror. As an adaptation that is both intensely faithful to and decidedly dissident from the source material, Jekyll and Hyde manages to tell the tale and capture it’s atmosphere but also mixes things up and takes it to a whole other level with an original twist, and improves upon
it, if that’s at all possible. Starring Redfield himself in a tour-de-force performance that shines with intelligence and class, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde also features an excellent ensemble cast, airtight direction, baroque studio sets and majestic lighting, fashioning an early 20th century
England full of magic, trepidation, violence and horror for it’s charming and scummy characters to wallow through...for those with a love for classic suspense literature and a flair for the theatrical, this rare treat comes recommended.”

Every week I get dozens of videos in the mail from aspiring filmmakers tucked into every nook and cranny of the nation, most of them offering feature films that are unreleased, un-premiered (except for their friends) and unsung. About half of them show some spark of promise. Some have great scripts, great photography, complex professional editing and a unique point of view. But almost all of them have bad acting.

Again and again I've counseled these filmmakers: "Uh, great job, but why didn't you, like, find some professional actors?"

The answers range from "can't afford it" to "there aren't any in my town" to "this is not the kind of material that needs much acting."

And yet actors, as much as I admire them, are a cheap commodity when it comes to making a film. I don't care where you live, you can find a hundred actors -- trained actors, experienced actors -- who can bring life to a film role, and probably for not that much money, since they're almost always desperate to work.

I'm not saying make them work free, but even if you DID make them work free, you could still go down to the theater department at the community theater and find competent actors.

But most young filmmakers don't get it. They don't want trained actors. Trained actors make them nervous. Trained actors make them aware of their own lack of knowledge in that area. So they use their friends, and their friends usually stink.

And then, once in a great while, somebody gets it exactly right. Usually an actor turned director.

That's what happened with "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," an independent film out of Baltimore -- lately a hotbed of indie talent -- where Mark Redfield starred, directed, co-wrote, co-produced, designed the sets, and presumably invented the chemical emulsion for the film in a kind of Orson Welles virtuoso effort that includes two dozen superb actors doing the most difficult kind of project -- an old story that everyone knows, set in a strange historical period, with odd accents, on Expressionistic studio sets, in which everything depends on the believability of his own transformation into the monster. (Some facial prosthetics and creepy makeup did help.)

Redfield and his producing/writing partner, Stuart Voytilla, have created both a kinder, gentler Jekyll and a vicious, more brutal Hyde, returning in many cases to the original Robert Louis Stevenson novella but setting the story in 1900 London so that they can take advantage of turn-of-the-century technology for an astounding surprise ending.

They restore the mystery element to the story in the form of Gabriel Utterson, Jekyll's attorney, who determines to find out who Edward Hyde really is -- even though it's difficult at this point in history to really suspend enough disbelief to wonder about his identity. Carl Randolph plays the solicitor with elegance and subtlety. R. Scott Thompson plays the suspicious Mordecai, the brother of Jekyll's fiancÈe, with seething menace.

And the two underwritten females -- Elena Torrez as the sensitive trollop, Kosha Engler as the lovesick fiancÈe -- are both emotionally full, although Torrez seems a little too refined to be a street girl. Robert Leembruggen steals several scenes as the earthy pimp Jack Little, and JR Lyston is an excellent bumbling inspector in the film's only comic-relief role.

The whole is filmed in a brooding fantasy London that owes debts to both "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Bride of Frankenstein," giving it a comfortable nostalgic quality that feels like pre-1945 Hollywood.

Redfield himself is a veteran theater actor whose Jekyll/Hyde is thoroughly traditional, yet done with such precision and nuance that you search his face constantly for clues to where he's going next. The mad-scientist aspect is downplayed; this Jekyll seems like a well-meaning kind-hearted researcher who is done in by his own invention. All in all, a satisfying well-told story that should receive, at the least, some network television exposure. This project has everything that low-budget regional filmmaking is supposed to deliver.

Thank God. Just when I was dreading that next video on the pile ...

Let's take a look at those drive-in totals:

Six dead bodies. One creepy la-bore-atry. Bullet to the brain. Bawdy stews. Bloody claw marks. Four thrashings, one with cane, one with wine bottle to the head, one fatal. One suicide. One attempted rape. Multiple convulsions. Finger rolls. Dry Ice Fu.

Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Carl Randolph, as the serious solicitor who thinks there's something "abominable" about this Mr. Hyde; Robert Leembruggen, as the body-parts robber and pimp who likes a little toddy now and then; Kosha Engler, as the fragile fiancÈe Miriam; Elena Torrez, whose Cockney comes and goes but who has a way of steaming up the screen as the prostitute Claire who says "You're a right gentleman, you are"; R. Scott Thompson, as the conniving suspicious brother who says "She will not speak to you, she made herself quite plain, she will never see you again"; and Mark Redfield, for doing the whole Kenneth Branagh thing, in his effort to "discover the biological basis for good and evil."

Four stars.

Joe Bob says check it out.

(To reach Joe Bob, go to joebobbriggs.com or email him at JoeBob@upi.com. Snail-mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.)