Edge of Sanity does not find Anthony Perkins at his sleaziest. That would be Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion, but if one discounts that 1984 film, then yes, holy crap, Edge of Sanity finds Anthony Perkins at his sleaziest. (Interestingly, both pictures contain scenes that sexualize nuns.)
Like virtually everything he did in the wake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, this Budapest-lensed, Victorian-set production of Harry Alan Towers (H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come) typecasts Perkins as a maniacally unhinged character. At least it’s one of popular culture’s most enduring: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde. Of course, Perkins begins the picture playing Dr. Jekyll, the buttoned-down but workaholic ego to Hyde’s rampaging id. The dual personality is gained through pure accident after synthesizing an anesthetic alternative to morphine in his lab; a coked-up monkey kicks over a vial of this into a pile of that, and the resulting cloud Jekyll inhales brings out the beast in him.
With a 19th-century bong ever at the ready for a moment’s-notice smoke, Hyde trolls the streets of London looking for whores to feel up and kill — expressly in that order, because even Hyde has his limits. Director Gérard Kikoïne (the following year’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptation Buried Alive, also for Towers), however, seems not to, even setting Perkins up to deliver a woefully anachronistic James Bond joke as Hyde introduces himself at a party of disrepute: “Hyde … Jack Hyde.” See, Edge merges Stevenson’s literary creation with another UK legend, this one not fictional: serial killer Jack the Ripper.
To honor due credit, Perkins simply could have rested and let his makeup do Hyde (or an emaciated version of MTV personality Kurt Loder) for him, but the man was a true professional, giving his all to a project he had to know was junk. Edge of Sanity is, after all, a strange case in itself — a fairly insane picture in which Hyde masturbates a prostitute with a cane, just because. Although not as enthusiastic as Perkins, the ravishing Glynis Barber (Invaders of the Lost Gold) matches him in talent, playing Jekyll’s all-too-understanding wife. You feel more for Barber than for her character. —Rod Lott