The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Split Personality, or to give it its technical name Multiple Personality Disorder and more recently Dissociative Identity Disorder, concerns individuals who have a condition where they periodically manifest one or more different personalities. This is a real world phenomenon and there have been a number of non-fiction works about people affected with such a condition.
Split Personality entered the Psycho-Thriller with Norman Bates and Psycho (1960) and there have been numerous other examples of split personality psychos. The Other (1972) created a unique twist where we had two twins, one good and one bad, before a twist ending reveals that one of them only exists in the other’s mind. Similar kinds of Conceptual Reversal Twists where characters are revealed to be inside someone’s head have been popular since.
The most famous fictional Split Personality was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Dr Jekyll is an upstanding doctor who invents a potion that brings out his evil side that proceeds to rampage forth conducting wanton mayhem. This has been filmed multiple times – for which see Jekyll and Hyde Films. Another example would be the Batman villain Two-Face who is a physically divided personality with one side of his face scarred, one regular and his personality split between good and evil.
Softcore all-girl take on the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story concerning a formula that brings out repressed sexuality. The expected tumblings are handled with an arty flair that makes for an undeniably interesting watch
Retelling of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from cult Euro erotica director Walerian Borowczyk. Not quite the erotic retelling one expects, this nevertheless conducts some radical revisions
The revived Hammer Films takes on adapting Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with Eddie Izzard playing the role as a trans woman. This offers some amusing modernisations of the familiar, oft-filmed story
After the Blaxploitation fad gave us Blacula and Blackenstein, there came this wild variation on the Jekyll/Hyde story where a good African-American doctor takes a potion and turns into a rampaging white monster
Psycho-thriller with Gregory Hines as a radio talkback host dealing with a psychopathic caller who plays a series of taunting games with him
Christopher Nolan brought the cinematic Batman franchise back to life with Batman Begins and here expands it into something amazing. The show is capped off by Heath Leder’s towering Academy Award winning performance as The Joker
A passable psycho-sexual thriller that copies Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct with Andrea Roth caught between two men, one of who seems to be stalking her
A blatant copy of Basic instinct with psychologist Bruce Willis getting involved with Jane March as his patients start being murdered. Much bare flesh but the film is killed by ludicrous plot twists
Surrealist film from Raul Ruiz that proves a tedious, drawn-out ramble through disconnected images and non-sequiturs
A very strange surrealist film about the strange characters that populate a rundown hotel. Includes reincarnation, alien bug people and John Malkovich as a psychiatrist with red hair in a bow
A high-profile studio film based on the real-life Boston Strangler murders. This is liberal with the facts but Tony Curtis giving one of his best performances as Albert DeSalvo
Award-winning Darren Aronofsky film about the rivalry between two ballerinas. At heart though, this is no more than a Brian De Palma psycho-thriller with pretensions
Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders, an animated homage to the 1960s Batman tv series reuniting Adam West and Burt Ward, was a quirky delight. This is a sequel in the same vein, although more a case of a joke that tires in the retelling
The Long Halloween Part One was one of the best DC animated films in some time, now comes the concluding chapter, which alas fails to fulfill the promise that the first film showed
Tim Burton’s superlative duo of Batman films were wrecked after Joel Schumacher took up the director’s chair and turned the films into giant camp fests. Here he allows a madly overacting Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones loose as the villains
Spanish Found Footage film about the investigation of a haunted woods during which almost nothing happens, before a left-field twist ending that makes little sense
One of the best of the horror anthologies from UK’s Amicus Films. This adapts four stories from Robert Bloch, which are all tales told by the inmates of the titular asylum and settle in with chill effectiveness
Ingenue slasher film from Sage Bannick about a teacher finding his pupils are being killed, this eventually settles down as an old hat evil twin plot
The third of Abbott and Costello’s comedic meet ups with the Famous Monsters – in this case a series of lowjinks as they encounter Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (played by Boris Karloff)
Psycho-thriller that should have gotten better notice than it did. Katie Holmes plays an A-student at an Ivy League college who is stalked by a missing ex. Slick and coolly written, before arriving at an effective twist ending