Some stories, you have to say, are perennials. Just how many versions of Frankenstein and Dracula have been made (and have yet to be made) around the world? Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is another one, and has probably been filmed just as many times as Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker's classics. Not too bad for a book Stevenson managed to knock out in just three days' time.

They've even made at least half of the split personality a woman before in other movies (Edgar Ulmer's Daughter of Dr. Jekyll had a female scientist who fears she may have inherited her father's problem genetically and Roy Ward Baker's Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde has the good doctor turning into a woman) so going in I was worried that the well had been visited too many times in this case. But apparently there was enough water down there for at least one more bucket, because Jacqueline Hyde is pretty good.

Jackie Hyde (to be accurate to the novel she should be Jackie Jekyll, but oh well) is a telemarketer who is not doing all that well in her job (at one point she's driven to scream "I have a life, bitch!" into the phone, so you might feel it would have only been a matter of time before she snapped and brought a gun to work). But her life seems to take a turn for the better when she inherits her grandfather's house (her grandfather having died in a looney opening scene that is like the bastard love child of Basic Instinct and Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce), but then things aren't necessarily what they're cracked up to be -- in one room of the house is a cabinet full of test tubes that contain a glowing red liquid, and it's only a matter of time before that red liquid has the power to transform Jackie into someone else.

The movie twists up the premise a little by having Jackie able to transform into pretty much who she wants (at one point she turns into her sexy neighbor and at another into the neighbor's boyfriend), but when she sees a photo of a model in a magazine, she finds just the way she wants to look in her closeups and begins to live the hypersexed life she'd been hoping to live up until then -- at one point she gets it on with a tree!

While in the throes of her schizophrenic life (at least she doesn't have the telemarketing job anymore) she begins to develop a crush on the young man she first met when he showed her the house, and it isn't too long before Jackie/Jacqueline start taking him for a walk on the wild side.

Writer-director Rolfe Kanefsky has crafted a film that delivers on pretty much all the levels it needs to -- it's fairly sexy, the special effects are solid and there's actually a smattering of psychological depth to the story. I like that Jackie's id expresses itself in a way that is in keeping with her personality and thus a little different from Edward Hyde's rampages in the novel. The fact that a lot of the story is spun its own cloth and not that of it's source gives it a little bit of an edge on some of the more recent stabs at filming the (by now familiar) novel.

As Jackie, Gabriella Hall (who is also the film's producer) manages to convey the character's discomfort with herself and the world around her very well. You can sense a willingness to subjugate herself in the way she talks and acts around people, which sets up her transformations into Jacqueline (played with an air of sensual menace by Blythe Metz, who manages to work the nastier side of her perky good looks) and makes them, so help me, kind of poignant.

The dvd has an affable but average commentary track by Kanefsky, Hall and Metz, a making of featurette that is pretty standard stuff, and deleted scenes that go a little more into the grandfather's story and contain a few naughty bits. A pretty decent array of extras for a low budget film such as this, but nothing earthshattering. The best thing about the dvd is the movie itself, and that's the way it should be.

(By the way, the movie comes in R and Unrated versions -- this review is based on the Unrated disc -- there will probably be quite a few cuts made on the R-rated disc.)