This week on The 80s Movie Podcast, host Edward Havens revisits Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980), the offbeat comedy that gave Oliver Reed the chance to play both a shy, awkward doctor and his outrageous alter ego. Directed by Charles B. Griffith and loosely inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic story, the film follows Dr. Adrian Heckyl as he creates a formula that transforms him into the loud, confident, and wildly inappropriate Mr. Hype. Alongside Reed, the cast includes Sunny Johnson, Jackie Coogan, and character actor staples from late 1970s and early 1980s comedy.
In this episode, Edward digs into the film’s unusual mix of satire, broad comedy, and horror influences while exploring how Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype tried to modernize Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for a different era. He also examines Oliver Reed’s dual performance, the film’s troubled critical reception, and why its humor divided audiences even as it carved out a small following among fans of strange studio comedies.
What happens when a familiar literary story collides with 1980s sex comedy, celebrity culture, and social satire? Edward revisits the creative choices behind Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype and considers where the film fits within the larger wave of eccentric comedies released at the start of the decade. Whether you remember it from cable television or have never heard of it before, this episode of The 80s Movie Podcast takes a closer look at a movie that rarely enters conversations about 1980s comedy.
[00:00:07] From Los Angeles, California, the entertainment capital of the world, it's The 80s Movie Podcast. I'm your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. Today, on this 137th episode of the show, I'm going to be starting a new semi-regular series called Produced and Abandoned that brings movies that were made and barely exhibited back to the spotlight, if even only for a moment.
[00:00:33] One of the many advantages of having a non-linear podcast like this one is that I, as the host and the researcher and the writer, can zag unexpectedly at a moment's notice when I feel compelled to. And that happened to me this week. For a film historian like myself who focuses on movies from a specific discipline like, say, from the 1980s, the internet is a veritable cornucopia of people who share in some way many of your same passions,
[00:00:59] and you will find them doing a lot of the legwork unintentionally for you, or pointing you in a direction you didn't know you needed to go. In 2026, I, Edward Havens, still have an active Facebook account, which I mainly use to keep in touch with my friends and family who are scattered throughout the globe. I've curated my feed so that the non-relative crazy uncles and aunts of the world with their tinfoil hats and indecipherable conspiracy theories about the strangest subjects do not reach me.
[00:01:28] So it's not as toxic a space as many people know it to be. Sometime last week, thanks to filmmaker Adam Rifkin, I learned about a private Facebook group called Old Movie Newspaper and Print Ads from Around the World. Nearly a century of digital newspaper clippings mostly from the United States and mostly from the 1970s and 1980s.
[00:01:48] If, for example, if you wanted to know how many theaters the god-awful 1988 Joe Piscopo horror action comedy film Dead Heat opened at in Detroit in May of 1988, I can tell you that now. It was 21 theaters, by the way, including four drive-ins. And while perusing this private Facebook group of insane movie nerds, my kind of people, I saw an ad for an Oliver Reed movie I had never heard of before, Dr. Heckle and Mr. Hype.
[00:02:19] Well, the episode that I had been working on, that I've been tinkering with for damn more than two years now, was moved to the back burner once again, for the time being. I had to learn more about this movie, and I had to learn about it right then and there, because that's who I am. At 1.30 in the morning, with a toddler ready to wake up in five and a half hours, I was exhausted, but at least I was going to get the ball rolling.
[00:02:42] And what I discovered is just how amazingly quick this film went from concept to writing to production to completion. In an interview published in the 1997 book Backstory 3, Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s, the film's writer and director, Charles B. Griffith, described how the film came together. The title, originally Dr. Feelgood and Mr. Height, was one of several joke titles and ideas that Griffith had come up with
[00:03:09] for an expected meeting with Francis Ford Coppola about getting a movie made in the late 1970s. Griffith's own pitch for the film was that a hippie invents a new drug that turns its users into advertising executives. It was more meant to be an opening icebreaker joke than a real movie. After filming the movie Up from the Depths in the Philippines in 1978, Griffith would find himself talking to Canon Films co-president Menachem Golan,
[00:03:35] who wanted Griffith to write a screenplay for The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood. While that film would get made, it would get made without Griffith ever signing on to it. But the two men would continue to talk regularly, as Griffith had been a roommate of Golan's when the Israeli filmmaker first arrived in America. And during one of those talks around New Year's Day of 1980, Golan asked Griffith, who had just finished a two-decade-long, two-dozen-screenplay working relationship with Roger Corman, what he wanted to do next.
[00:04:04] Griffith would blurt out, for whatever reason, the title and pitch for Dr. Feelgood and Mr. Hype. And Golan loved the idea. He was ready to put $750,000 into the production, provided Griffith had the film ready in four months. Ready to screen at the con-film market in four months, that is. Now, Griffith hadn't written a script for Dr. Feelgood at this point.
[00:04:29] All he had was that very basic one-line concept, because it was never meant to be an actual film. Breaking down his timeline, Griffith figured he had three weeks to write and prep the film, a month to shoot, and two weeks to edit the footage. Of the $750,000 budget, Griffith would get $25,000 to write and another $25,000 to direct. As mentioned a moment ago, Griffith was a veteran of working with Roger Corman,
[00:04:55] so getting a shooting script ready in three weeks shouldn't have been a problem. Griffith, after all, had famously written the screenplay for The Little Shop of Horrors in just two days. And Griffith would completely change the direction of the story, as well as the title. Canon's own press release for the film would sum up the new story thusly. Horror spoof, very loosely based on the R. L. Stevenson story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hype.
[00:05:20] Lovable yet unattractive chiropodist, Dr. Henry Heckle takes an overdose of a slimming drug, believing it will kill him. The drug transforms him, and he becomes handsome and slim. He seduces several women, all of whom recoil from him when they see the ugliness in his eye. The drug begins to wear off, and he takes a second dose, and he begins to terrorize the local community. Finally, he realizes that his love, coral, loves him for himself,
[00:05:48] preferring the physically ugly, but the spiritually beautiful. At first, Griffith tried to get the legendary Dick Van Dyke to play the titular characters, but Mr. Van Dyke was booked for all of 1980, appearing in the title role in a Broadway revival and U.S. tour of The Music Man. So he would turn to his second choice, who was, naturally, as one would expect as a second choice to be, for the wiry, immensely talented singer, dancer, and actor Dick Van Dyke,
[00:06:18] the incredibly talented but somewhat pudgy, pirsute and not exactly known as a singer and dancer, Oliver Reed. By 1980, Mr. Reed had lost a lot of his star luster that made him an unusual heartthrob throughout the late 60s and early 70s. Not that he wasn't working on a regular basis. In fact, when Reed agreed to take the lead roles here, Griffith would have exactly one week to work with the legendary actor,
[00:06:46] who had a tiny hole in his schedule before he needed to arrive in Paris, to begin production on Disney's Condor Man. That wouldn't be a problem for Griffith, who was used to dealing with massive production changes at the last minute. Reed's casting was announced to the press in late February, after Griffith had already cast Catherine Mary Stewart, who had recently finished her first film role in Menachem Golan's The Apple, as Coral, the beautiful young woman who falls for Heckle, as well as Corman Regulars' Mel Wells and Dick Miller,
[00:07:15] and Jackie Coogan, the child star of Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, who found a renewed fame as Uncle Fester on the beloved 1960s television sitcom The Addams Family. The film would also be the first film for diminutive actor Tony Cox, best known as Marcus, from the Bad Santa movies. Filming was scheduled to begin on March 3rd in Los Angeles. The schedule front-loaded to get everything they needed from Reed before they lost him. But just before filming began, Griffith would lose his leading lady.
[00:07:42] I can't find out why Catherine Mary Stewart left the film before production began, but Griffith would find her replacement in Sonny Johnson. Johnson certainly had more film experience than Stewart, having appeared on an episode of Charlie's Angels, and featured in Bill Murray's Where the Buffalo Roam, and in Animal House. Although her scenes in the latter film would end up on the proverbial cutting room floor, Johnson would go on to co-star alongside Jennifer Beals in 1983's Flashdance,
[00:08:10] before sadly passing away in June of 1984 at the age of 30 of a ruptured aneurysm. She would join the cast the day before production began. Despite the legendary tales of Reed and his love of debauchery and excessive drinking, there are no contemporary reports of him being anything but an absolute gentleman on and off the set during his time with the production. The only issue Griffith had with the actor was that Reed had a fantastic take on Heckle, with a brilliant New York accent and sophistication,
[00:08:39] but for Hyde, he would be slow and ponderous, you know, like the stereotypes of Oliver Reed. Busy with production, Griffith never noticed that in the Hollywood press, Canon Films had, in promoting the 17 films they'd be selling at the Cannes Film Festival's market in early May, been telling the press that the budget for Dr. Heckle was not $750,000, but $3 million. A not unusual mood for producers trying to get bigger sales from foreign markets.
[00:09:10] But sure enough, Griffith would have a 99-minute movie fully edited by Skip Schgulnik, whose next editing job would be on Halloween 2, and a musical score by Richard Band, ready for its first Cannes Film Market screening on May 11th. The film would screen a total of eight times in 11 days, although there aren't any reports of how many countries Canon might have sold the film to during those two weeks. From all contemporary appearances, Canon was preparing to open the film in the United States on October 10th,
[00:09:39] a date seemingly picked because Oliver Reed would be done with Conderman and not due on the set of his next film, Toby Hooper's Venom, until the end of October. And as would be the norm in 1980, Canon would prepare a sneak preview of the film to gauge audience reaction. On Friday, July 18th, 1980, Dr. Heckle and Mr. Hype would have a sneak preview at the Nickelodeon Theater in Boston, and, according to the person who posted the image in the Movie Ads Facebook group, that would be the only
[00:10:09] paying public screening of the film, that it would be shelved forever from theatrical screening and banished to an otherwise ignoble premiere on VHS some years later. And while that is mostly true, it's not exactly 100% true. I was able to find at least two actual theatrical release playdates, both opening on that same July 18th as the Boston Sneak preview, at the Golden Mile Twin and the Imperial Six in Toronto,
[00:10:38] two evening shows a day at the Golden Mile and five daily shows at the Imperial Six. The only contemporary hint as to how the film played in Toronto was that both screens dropped the film after a single week. Canon would continue to promote and show the movie at various film festivals and markets around the globe, including at the Montreal Film Festival in late August 1980, where Menachem Golan's crazy disco sci-fi musical The Apple was screening in competition. And in an August 26th, 1980 article
[00:11:08] about Canon films in The Hollywood Reporter, it would be stated that Dr. Heckle was one of eight movies Canon was still planning to release theatrically before the end of the year. Except that never ended up happening. Dr. Heckle and Mr. Hype does not appear to have ever played in any cinema outside of maybe one screening at a film festival in Barcelona on June 8th, 1981, but I can't find anything about this screening outside of a listing on the IMDb release info page.
[00:11:38] The film would start showing up on VHS tapes around the world with titles like Experiencia Fatal in Brazil, Boyfriend and Wild in Greece, Dr. Heriku and Mr. Hype in Japan, and my personal favorite, I'm Ugly But I Want to Conquer in Hungary. In May of 2026, one can find the movie available for free with ads on the Tubi platform, as well as a pirated copy on the most popular
[00:12:07] English language video sharing platform. I might sit down one day and watch it, but as I said on the previous episode, I have a lot of plans for this podcast. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again, hopefully real soon. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, the80smoviepodcast.com, for extra materials about Dr. Heckle and Mr. Hype. The 80s Movie Podcast has been researched, written, narrated, and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
[00:12:36] Thank you again. Good night.