***SPOILERS*** Updated version of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyell and Mr.Hyde" in the Watts ghetto of L.A. with the understanding and gentle Dr. Henry Pride, Bernie Casey. Henry through his experimenting with a serum would cure hepatitis and regenerate liver cells. It in fact turns him into the brutal and ruthless Mr.Hyde! A much better movie that one would guess with Casey and the supporting cast lifting the film well above the standards that one would expect from this black exploitation movie of 1976.
Henry had a lifelong dream of curing damaged liver cells and related diseases, like hepatitis, since his dear mother died of liver disease right in front of him and his sister Dr. Billie Worth, Rosalind Cash, when he was a little boy. Henry also has over the years developed a deep hatred and resentment against prostitutes whom he holds responsible for his mothers death. Henry's mother worked as a maid in a local bordello, where she and her son and daughter were given a place to live by the owner, and the night that she fell ill and died none of the "ladies", as Henry called them, would come to her aid or call for medical help.
Coming up with a serum that he thought would cure liver disease Dr. Pride needed someone to try it on but if it was ever found out that he did that, as his sister warned him, it would destroy everything that he and his sister worked for. Which is the free clinic that they founded and ran in the Watts ghetto for the poverty stricken people who lived there.
Trying the serum on himself turned the sweet and kindly Henry into an albino-like monster where his hatred of prostitutes and those who employ and support them, pimps and johns, came to the surface with deadly and destructive results. Linda, Marie O'Henry, a local prostitute who Henry fell in love with, and was treating for hepatitis, once tried to use the serum on her to see if it would work but without success, Linda refused to be injected with it. Dr. Pride then tried the serum on himself where, to Linda's shock and horror, he turned into murderous Mr.Hyde!
With the body count of his victims raising at an alarming pace Linda begged Henry, while he was still normal, to turn himself over to the police so that the killing would stop and that he could get help. Henry wouldn't listen and continued with his murderous rampage until the police finally tracked him down and cornered him in the Watts Towers. After holding the police off, with Linda as a hostage, Henry doing a King Kong imitation climbed to the top of the towers and is then killed by a barrage of police bullets. As Henry fell to his death the terror that he unleashed on the ghetto of Watts, and the people that live there, came to an end.
Much better then one would expect with Bernie Casey and the supporting cast rising up the movie where it's entertaining as well as thought-provoking. You really feel for Dr. Henry Pride to the point where your both sympathetic as well as outraged at what he was and what he became. With an ending that makes you see that Henry's obsession with curing liver cells and hepatitis was indeed a noble and righteous effort, for the good of all humanity. It's the way that Henry went about it and with the consequences that resulted from it destroyed, like his sister warned him, everything that he ever worked for and in the end even himself.
