Dr. Jekyll & Mistress Hyde (2003)

Dr. Jackie Stevenson is a Los Angeles based therapist and scientist who tries to invent a serum to separate the pure from the lustful side of the female psychosis. After she has an unsuccessful experiment with a female client named Martine, which drove her patient to insanity and to a mental hospital, Jackie tries part of the serum on herself and becomes her lustful alter ego Heidi Hyde; a voracious lesbian who prowls the streets of L.A. after dark looking for carnal pleasures. Things get more weird when "Heidi" picks up a young prostitute named Dawn for a one-night stand, and who begins to visit Jackie for therapy sessions as well. Soon the line between reality and illusion blurs and it leads to Jackie finding out that her husband is cheating on her with her maid Paula which leads "Heidi" to plan a revenge with Dawn's help. Is Dawn really what she appears to be?

I'm not going to lie and say this movie is good for anything for than softcore porn. One of my friends told me that this is not like most softcore flicks, because it actually has a good story. I don't happen to agree one bit. I could spend weeks dismantling this movie aesthetically. I understand it was shot on an extremely low-budget, but even skin flicks usually contain sets that are dressed up to appear like certain locations. The movie opens on a talk show set, and it literally just shows close-ups of the host and interviewee against an anonymous background. They don't even face each other and they're individually framed, not even hiding from the audience the fact that they shot each woman separately. I'm guessing they shot the whole movie with one video camera, because there are moments where you see a woman's body and her face in isolated shots, even though there were no body doubles involved. If there's anything good I can say about the movie aesthetically, it's that the acting is not bad. The actresses are actually fairly convincing.

I once saw Richard Roeper review an erotic foreign film, and he said that, "If I rave about a comedy because it makes me laugh, then I guess this movie makes me feel proud that I'm a man with 20/20 vision." The moral of that statement is that men are often afraid to admit something is erotic and a turn-on to them, with the risk of being called perverts. I'm not afraid to admit that this movie is very erotic, and it succeeds on that level. The first 30-minutes-or-so contains softcore oral sex scenes, which are obviously simulated and something laughable, but the rest of the movie really takes off. And just my good luck, 95 percent of the sex scenes involve girl-on-girl activity. That's right, no men involved. And I can honestly say that I found every actress in the movie attractive, especially the lead actress who looks even more sexy in glasses and a business suit. Unlike many girl-on-girl scenes, the actresses looked like they were really into what they were doing, and not like they're just anticipating reactions from the horny guys in the audience.