Welcome back to the RetrOasis. Today, we are putting a late-era, modernized indie horror artifact onto the slab.
I’m talking about John Carl Buechler’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2006), starring the legendary Tony Todd in the dual role of Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde.
I was genuinely excited when I realized this disc belonged in the RetrOasis vault. Stevenson’s classic 1886 novella was almost my very first public domain revitalization project. I’ve read the original story countless times and watched dozens of screen adaptations over the years. But my own creative project, “Hyde Me,” had run aground. I sat down to rewatch this 2006 vehicle to see how another creator handled the material—because if I can’t add something fresh to a 140-year-old classic, I don’t want to do it at all.
Well, after sitting through Tony Todd’s midtown L.A. rampage, I am officially ready to dive back into “Hyde Me.” Because as a filmmaker who has made bad movies, I can say this with total confidence: bad movies need to be seen, too—if only to show us what not to do!
Full Moon Pedigree and Modernized Mayhem
If the creature effects feel like a throwback to 1980s video store shelves, there’s a very specific reason for it. Director John Carl Buechler was absolute FX royalty—he was the legendary effects wizard for Charles Band’s Empire Pictures and Full Moon (Ghoulies, Troll, From Beyond), and Roger Corman himself once declared Buechler “the best FX guy in the business.”
Buechler stacked the cast with iconic B-movie faces:
- Vernon Wells (The Road Warrior) showing up to add raw genre muscle.
- Tracy Scoggins, who gets the absolute best line in the entire script when explaining her anti-gun stance: “A piece of his skull hit me in the eye!”
- Tony Todd, whose performance swings wildly between brilliant intensity and total absurdity.
The movie abandons all subtext and mystery right out of the gate. There is zero moral ambiguity or slow-burn dread—Jekyll is violent, quip-heavy, and grotesque from scene one. By the third act, the overscripted, repetitive dialogue breaks down entirely, and the film morphs into a bizarre, 8-foot King Kong parody.
The Missing-Streaming Reality
You won’t find this modernized monster sitting comfortably on your mainstream subscription apps.
While it received a minor 30-theater regional release in Louisiana and Virginia before landing on Image Entertainment DVD in 2008, it has essentially vanished into licensing limbo. Modern streaming databases bring up empty hands. It is a textbook catalog title that existed briefly on plastic, made its money, and was abandoned by corporate digital aggregators.
The Verdict
Is it a good movie? Not by a long shot. It isn’t going to make anyone’s Top 10 list of Stevenson adaptations. But for cult collectors, Tony Todd completists, and FX historians, it is a fascinating, heavily stylized artifact of mid-2000s indie horror.
More importantly for me, it proved that the classic story still has vast, unexplored territory left to mine.
You are entirely entitled to disagree with my evaluation of this film, but you won’t find it in the streams to prove me wrong. You’ve gotta hunt down the plastic, pop in the disc, and send me an email.
Keep your physical media safe, protect your discs, and keep the history alive.
#jekyllandhyde #publicdomain #tonytodd #bmovie #cult #classic #retroasis
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