This is basically one big just a trick of the trade for Mr. Hyde who is combined with Jack the Ripper in this Anthony Perkins film that was near the end of his career. Basically, he was taking any film offer that came along, and this just shows the desperation he was facing to work. The sad thing is that it looks like it was actually made with a decent budget, but the problem is that the script focuses on perversion rather than the story. It all starts when the future Dr. Henry Jekyll witnesses his father with a prostitute, and years later, he's a scientist experimenting with drugs who ends up transforming into a hideous looking old man whom women don't cringe and run away from. It's a disgusting, ugly promise from the start, and very unpleasant to watch.

The other big problem with the film is that the murders don't just happen. He goes out of his way to torture these women and the audience has to endure that agony along with the not too bright women he picks up. Even the non-horror scenes are very hard to watch, with Doctor Jekyll at one point working on someone's eyes with the camera too far close up. A scene where he uses a cane on one of the street girls is just too disgusting, first to pleasure her, and later to strangle her. Even with the attractive period set up, this is as much of a nightmare to get through as it is for the victims.

Prim and respectable physician Dr. Henry Jekyll (the late, great Anthony Perkins in sterling eye-rolling wacko form) transforms into the evil and deranged pasty-faced fiend Mr. Jack Hyde after a disastrous lab experiment inadvertently creates crack cocaine. Hyde terrorizes Victorian era London, England by savagely slaughtering prostitutes in the White Chapel district. Director Gerard Kikoine, working from a deliciously deviant and depraved script by J.P. Felix and Ron Raley, brings a genuinely shocking and surprising kinky sensibility to the familiar premise: The oodles of tasty female nudity (there's some male frontal nudity, too!),the startlingly raw'n'ribald perversity (a man watches from a window as Hyde pleasures a hooker with a cane in one especially lurid sequence),and the sizzling erotic sexuality all ensure that the incredibly seamy atmosphere reigns supremely sordid throughout. The sturdy acting from the capable cast rates as another major asset: Perkins has a histrionic field day in his juicy dual role, Glynnis Barber lends sound support as Jekyll's concerned wife Elisabeth, the fetching Sarah Maur Thorp vamps it up nicely as saucy tart Susannah, and Ben Cole positively oozes as slimy male hustler Johnny. The opulent set design, Tony Spratling's lush cinematography, the flavorsome evocation of the repressive Victorian period, and Frederic Talgorn's robust orchestral score give this picture an aura of class while the brutal killings draw a neat'n'nasty parallel to Jack the Ripper's notorious exploits. Good decadent fun.

Here's a sleazy take on the old Jekyll and Hyde story - with all the gratuitous sex and violence you would expect from infamous exploitation producer Harry Alan Towers, and then some! EDGE OF SANITY is an utterly bizarre film; the majority of it takes place in standard period setting, with atmospheric camera-work on the cobbled alleyways at night and authentic buildings. Then it suddenly jumps to the interior of a brothel where we are introduced to characters wearing openly '80s leather fashions and hairstyles and the whole period realism thing comes crashing down.

Plot coherence is the least of this film's qualities. Headling the lead role of the disturbed killer is none other than that old PSYCHO himself, Anthony Perkins, whose maniacal performance is something of an art form in itself. Perkins is bloody convincing as Hyde, achieving his transformation through red-rimmed eyes and white makeup alone, and he's also very scary indeed. It's a tribute to the actor how he could create two so opposing sides of the same character in the same movie, and he throws aside any subtlety from previous performers like Fredric March in favour of in-your-face deformity and madness. Basically, he's riveting, and it's a good thing too when the rest of the film is almost worthless.

There isn't much plot, so to speak of, and the police investigation seems tacked on and pointless. Every supporting actor and actress is wasted in their roles, either becoming stock story figures or, in the case of the women, pure sexuality. The only other actress to have any impact is Glynis Barber as Jekyll's wife, as she manages to give her long-suffering partner a sympathetic angle which makes her likable. But the only person to be really characterised is Perkins.

The murder scenes are quite disturbing to watch, seeing as that they are all very explicit and sexually-driven (not surprisingly, it appears the film was heavily cut here in the UK). There's a lot of fumbling and groping amid the bloody throat-slashings and it's incredible some of the stuff that Perkins does in the film - does this man have no morals? The film is far too arty in places, with lots of closeups of distorted faces along with odd lighting and camera angles which look good but signify nothing, yet Perkins' tour-de-force performance is worth watching alone, and very unsettling with it. Without him EDGE OF SANITY would be worthless, but with him it becomes an interesting - and bizarre - character study of madness and duel personality.