This one is bad, corny and lame enough to be fun for me. Since when was Mr. Hyde ever a werewolf-vampire hybrid? Since this film of course! Dr. Lomas was a colleague of Dr. Jekyll and has been watching over Jekyll's estate and promise he can live there as long as he would like. Janet Smith and her soon to be husband George Hastings arrives at the mansion to learn that she has inherited the estate and money but is also told a dark secret - that she is the daughter of Dr. Jekyll. Now that she's learned who her father really is, she suddenly believes that it's hereditary and develops a madness with her nightmares and beliefs. But is it only her nightmare and beliefs or is she really transforming and killing the people turning up dead? 6/10

I didn't expect to find an example of the 1950's monster movie revival that could possibly be worse than The She Creature (1956 --see my review), but Daughter Of Dr. Jekyll is so bad, it makes The She Creature look like an Academy Award nominee. Daughter of Dr. Jekyll is simply awful in every department -- terrible script with insipid dialog, bad acting, draggy pacing, uninspired cinematography, papier mache sets. Not to mention shabby special effects. This movie was so cheap, they couldn't even afford a decent artificial fog machine for the what-should-have-been atmospheric outdoors on the moors scenes. At times it looked like they had simply fogged the negative to get a murky effect. Other times it seemed as if someone was sitting under the camera smoking a cigarette and letting the smoke curl upward. I would not kid about something like this! I haven't mentioned incompetent direction yet, but we're getting there. Edgar G. Ulmer has a cult following among some of the auteur worshipers which regards him as an unappreciated genius who could rise above the low budgets of his projects and put his personal stamp on them. This Ulmer mystic is primarily based on a half-dozen pretty good ones out of a gazillion crummy ones he directed. The Black Cat (1934) and Bluebeard (1944) are widely and deservedly recognized as minor horror classics, while Detour (1945) is worshiped all out of proportion to its modest merits by the nihilistic wing of the noir groupies. Personally, I thought The Strange Woman (1946), one of Ulmer's biggest budget productions, better than most rate it. But with its cast, which included Hedy Lamarr and George Sanders, it occurred to me that it would likely have been better if someone else had directed it.To get to the business at hand, Ulmer's bumbling direction in Daughter Of Dr. Jekyll must shoulder the blame for a competent cast, including John Agar and Arthur Shields, acting so poorly. It seems as if Ulmer told them they had to say their lines as quickly as possible, because they were in danger of running out of film. Maybe there was a doubtful, bought on the cheap, microphone, as well. Everyone shouts his our her lines with a frantic haste. Shields, normally almost as good an actor as his look-alike Accademy Award winning brother Barry Fitzgearald, in this turkey screeches, grimaces, and even waves his arms like one of the rejected try-outs in a high school play. Agar is even worse. He just seems angry, no matter what emotion he is supposed to be portraying. No doubt he was sore about being reduced to such penny ante productions. Well, he was an "A" actor at one time, and he should have laid off the whiskey if he wanted to stay one. Buxom female lead Gloria Talbot has her moments as the tormented title character, but it is only tall, craggy John Dierkes who rises above Ulmer's wacko direction to turn in a creditable performance as the sullen manor servant bent on righting the Jekyll wrongs.This picture is a serious stinker. Only for Ulmer cultists, die-hard fans of 'fifties horror, and desperate insomniacs. Others should avoid Daughter of Dr. Jekyll as if it were a skunk crossing the road.

Most of the time this movie is creepy and decently shot reminding me at best of "Night of the Hunter" and at worst of atmospheric fog machine filled horror. I thought of "Night of the Hunter" during the scene where the Daughter waits outside her father's tomb while in the same shot we see the big village man carving a stake. Very ominous. That said, the stake death is the worst I've seen.The technique of superimposing one shot over another for action/dream sequences worked well in my opinion, but others may find it unoriginal. Monster make-up and blood effects were pretty good. Over all the movie is serious with a comic moment I liked with the Monster showing obvious joy as he views a women in her night clothes through an open window. The narration at the beginning and the Monster's ridiculous line don't fit the mood of the picture.

I've read plenty about director Ulmer being some poverty-row genius but this flick is only 70 minutes long and is still boring. Mixing the Jekyll monster with werewolves may sound like a fun idea but the treatment here leaves much to be desired. The new widescreen DVD of this movie looks real soft throughout much of the movie which might be a fault of the original movie or just a bad transfer.