Entertainment

Cult Movie: I, Monster a Gothic lucky bag featuring horror's most dynamic duo

Christopher Lee in 1971 Amicus horror I, Monster
Christopher Lee in 1971 Amicus horror I, Monster Christopher Lee in 1971 Amicus horror I, Monster

I, Monster

I, MONSTER is a curious film. A 1971 adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s much-filmed novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, it has all the ingredients for a full-blown cult classic.

Made by Amicus Films, a low-budget movie-making house much beloved of cult aficionados, it reeks of that old-school fustiness and gothic atmosphere which that companies arch rival Hammer had patented in the previous decades and delivers a retelling of Stevenson’s story that is certainly authentic even if the character names have been changed to protect the copyright cautious.

It even – and this is important – stars that truly dynamic duo of genre offerings from the era, the great Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Now I’m firmly of the opinion that anything with Cushing and Lee in the cast list is worth spending time with but it’s still hard to shake the feeling that this particular outing for the boys is something of a disappointment.

It’s not, admittedly, without a certain period charm. It’s been released on Blu-ray this month by Indicator and it certainly looks better than it ever has, thanks to a neat 2K restoration, and comes packaged up with some seriously impressive extras, as you’d expect from a highly respected reissue label like Indicator.

Christopher Lee plays Marlowe, a mannered and slightly repressed psychiatrist type who seeks to explore fashionable Freudian theories about the multiple personalities that lurk within us all, injects himself with a serum and swiftly turns into a nasty and brutish character who calls himself Edward Blake.

Lee lurks around the sleepy gentlemen’s clubs and the foggy backstreets of Victorian London (actually sets left over from the recent hit adaptation of Oliver), giving his all to the dual role of Marlowe and Blake but even his bravado can’t salvage things.

Directed by Stephen Weeks, who was only 22 at the time and helming his first full-length film, it looks much plusher than it’s miniscule budget would suggest it should but it all moves at a snail’s pace and the transformation scenes, so key in these kind of films, are wholly unimpressive and mostly seem to consist of Lee sticking some false teeth in and having his eyebrows grow together like a 90s Noel Gallagher to symbolise the evil taking over the good in Marlowe’s personality.

Lee’s old partner in crime Cushing is almost criminally underused as Marlowe’s friend and advisor Dr Utterson and Radio 1 DJ turned would-be horror movie star Mike Raven turns up in one of several inexplicable acting roles he made around this time but he also fails to ignite the screen in the brief time he’s on it.

Weeks was saddled with a primitive, and frankly ridiculous, 3D technique that Amicus were keen to use but hadn’t really thought through, which means the director was forced to abandon the process halfway through production. The result is a creaky, and alarmingly short, Gothic lucky bag of a film that never quite delivers the goods despite the best intentions of all concerned.