Oliver Reed & Cannon Films’ Forgotten Shelved Horror Comedy: Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980)

This week on The 80s Movie Podcast, host Edward Havens launches a new semi-regular series, Produced and Abandoned, spotlighting films that were completed but largely discarded by their distributors. First up: the bizarre and nearly forgotten 1980 horror-comedy Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype, a very loose retelling of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring Oliver Reed in a dual role, and written and directed by Charles B. Griffith, the legendary screenwriter behind The Little Shop of Horrors. Produced by Cannon Films, the movie was rushed from concept to completion in just a few months, only to practically vanish from theaters. Edward explores the film’s wild production history, from Griffith’s original comedy concept and failed attempt to cast Dick Van Dyke to Oliver Reed’s last-minute involvement and the movie’s mysterious disappearance after only a handful of theatrical screenings. Plus: the connections to cult favorites like Condorman and The Apple, the strange international afterlife of the film on VHS, and why forgotten studio castoffs like Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype still deserve rediscovery decades later. ----more---- Transcript 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. 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, 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 have 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. So it's not as toxic a space as many people know it to be. Some time 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. 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 twenty one 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. Jekyll and Mr. Hype. 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 backburner 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 one thirty 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. 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 "Doctor Feelgood and Mr. Hype," was one of several joke titles and ideas that Griffith had come up with 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 Cannon Films co-president Menahem Golan, 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 A