Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of Five Cool Things, the bi-weekly article where I talk about all the interesting, fascinating, and yet cool things I’ve enjoyed since the last time I posted. This week I’m talking about a fun twist on the Jekyll and Hide story, a Swedish film noir, a comedic remake, a very silly cartoon, a magnificent classic, and a new Robin Hood trailer. So let’s get to it.
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde
I’ve become a huge fan of Hammer Studios and their horror output from the 1950s through the 1970s. Their best films are the ones where they re-imagined the classic Universal Monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy) and updated the stories for a (then) modern audience with extra sexiness and violence. But outside those films, there are still quite a few gems in the Hammer closet, including this one.
Hammer had actually adapted Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde twice before, but as you might surmise from this title, here they tweaked it a bit. Dr. Jekyll (Ralph Bates) has plans to cure all human diseases, but when he realizes this will take him more than the years of life he’s got left, he decides to invent an elixir that will allow him many more years. Since women generally live longer than men, he figures female hormones are the trick for everlasting life.
At first, he purchases freshly dead corpses (from real-life gravediggers/murderers Burke and Hare), but soon enough he’s killing local sex workers for their glands. As the title implies, when Dr. Jekyll takes his elixir, he not only turns into someone whose instincts are much baser and darker than his own, but he also turns into a woman (Martine Beswick), who he dubs Miss Hyde, whom he claims is his cousin.
As a white, straight, cis man, it isn’t my place to comment on how this film handles the gender roles so I will leave it to those more informed to dig into the details, but I will say Martine Beswick is a lot of fun to watch. Miss Hyde enjoys her newfound life and freedom, and she’s happy to do a bit of killing if that means she gets to stick around. As with all these stories, Jekyll and Hyde duel it out over who gets control of the body. I enjoyed every bit of that. I less enjoyed the romantic subplot, but never fear, it doesn’t get that much screen time.
Girl with Hyacinths
The Criterion Channel is running a collection they call Nordic Noir, which is probably self explanatory. I love me some film noir, and I love watching noirs from other countries. I’d never heard of this film (or any of the films in this collection, if I’m being honest), but I’m excited to dig in.
Girl with Hyacinths plays out a little like Citizen Kane in that it begins with a death and follows someone elsetrying to understand who this person was, giving us plenty of flashbacks as he talks to various people about the dead girl.
The girl was Dagmar Brink (Eva Henning) and she’s found dead in her apartment hanging by a rope. The police pretty quickly rule it a suicide, but her neighbor, Anders Wikner (Ulf Palme), can’t help but wonder who the girl was and why she ended her life. He begins talking to others that knew her—former lovers, coworkers, and friends. They all paint a picture of a kind girl, but shy and full of melancholy.
It isn’t nearly as stylish or full of cinematic tricks as Citizen Kane, but it is still a beautifully drawn story told really well. I won’t give it away, but the final reveal of why she killed herself is an all-timer.
The Naked Gun (2025)
I can’t remember now if I watched the original The Naked Gun when it came out in 1988 in the theater, but I absolutely watched it a million times on cable TV and VHS tape. I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. I saw the sequels in theaters, and while I thought they were still funny, they didn’t hold a candle to the first one.
Buy The Naked GunBut then within a few years, I forgot about all three films altogether. I’ve talked before about how I have a strange sense of humor. I don’t usually like straight-up comedies where they throw joke after joke at you. I like my comedies to have a real story, and characters that I care about. I want the jokes to come organically. I want them to make sense within the plot.
But I kept hearing good things about this The Naked Gun remake and I finally sat down to watch it with my wife (who loves a good comedy, the sillier the better). And yeah, this is funny. Sometimes very funny. Liam Neeson is perfect as the lead. He’s basically spoofing the dozens of action heroes he’s played over the last couple of decades, but he’s still playing it straight. Something about the mix of his gravitas with the absolutely nut-ball stuff that’s happening all around him makes this wonderfully hilarious. Pamela Anderson is great too as his love interest, and there is a montage in the middle of this film that’s one of the best things to happen last year.
Over the Garden Wall
My wife watched this animated mini-series several years ago and just loved it. She kept trying to show it to me, but I kept putting her off. Then sometime early last year, she got me to sit down with it, and I fell in love as well. I bought the DVD for her on her birthday, and now we regularly throw it on. It is a very short series with just ten episodes, all of which last just over ten minutes apiece, but it is an utter delight.
Buy Over the Garden WallElijah Wood stars as Wirt, an all-too-serious young teen, and Collin Dean as his younger, much sillier brother Greg. They get lost in a strange wood and come across a series of weird people and talking animals. It is strange and funny, heartfelt and scary, and impossible to describe.
The Princess Bride at Christmas
Every year sometime around the holidays, we get together with my wife’s family. Her parents live in a very small town in Kentucky where there is nothing to do, and it’s too cold to do anything anyway in late December. At some point during the festivities, we always settle down for a movie. When her nephews were little, we’d put on some animated film or The Polar Express (Nana’s favorite). But then one night, about six or seven years ago, someone had the bright idea to put in The Princess Bride.
Buy The Princess Bride (The Criterion Collection)It was an immediate hit. The nephews loved it, my much younger daughter loved it, and the grandparents loved it. We all loved it. The film truly is for everybody. After that one viewing, The Princess Bride became a tradition. Every holiday, we watch it. One year, we did the holidays in an old log cabin in Nashville, TN. Nobody remembered to bring the movie, but we found a way to stream it. During Covid, we weren’t able to get together but we darn sure all watched it at our own houses.
We’ve now all seen it so many times we wind up quoting it to each other as we watch. I joked that next year we’ll each take a character and perform it as we watch. We all laugh just a second before the jokes actually occur. And when it’s over, we cheer. It has become one of my favorite holiday memories. This year our viewing was especially poignant as we lost director Rob Reiner to a terrible act of violence.
The Death of Robin Hood
This A24 film posits, what if Robin Hood wasn’t so merry? What if he wasn’t so much a good guy, robbing the rich to help out the poor, but a raging, killing machine? From the trailer, it looks as if those days are behind him and he’s now old, dying, and full of regret. But then he meets a woman and her daughter, and he’s going to have one last mission to protect her from all the bad things.
Hugh Jackman is Robin Hood, Jodie Comer is the woman, and I’m the guy anxious to see what they can do with this old story.
