In Los Angeles, Dr. Henry Pride (Bernie Casey) is an accomplished and wealthy African American medical doctor working on a cure for cirrhosis of the liver along with his colleague, Dr. Billie Worth (Rosalind Cash).
Desperate to create this remedy, Pride conducts unethical experiments on others and himself, which turns him into a white-skinned Frankensteinian monster with superhuman strength and invincibility.
Specifically, it was part of the blaxploitation horror genre that came about in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the box office success of American International Pictures’ Blacula, which was also directed by William Crain.
Cynthia Erb delves into many different aspects and themes of Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde, while also discussing the blaxploitation horror genre, in her book Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture.
"[5] At one point in the film, Pride takes Linda back to his house after a date, where she refuses to be tested on; subsequently, he asks: "What if I insist?".
In his book, Educational Institutions in Horror Film: A History of Mad Professors, Student Bodies, and Final Exams, Andrew L. Grunzke acknowledges how this is eerily similar to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.
[6] Grunzke also argues that Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde provides commentary on evolutionary arguments for slavery by depicting Pride-as-Hyde with "ape-like features, body hair and the like."
His struggle is cognizant of King Kong’s in how he must navigate his own divide between the “white affluent areas around UCLA and sections of Watts inhabited by a black underclass.
Rather than the biplanes that attempt to kill King Kong, Los Angeles Police use helicopters to shine bright lights on him as they eventually shoot him, leading to his subsequent fall to his death.
Pride is a successful black doctor who has achieved great wealth and standing within the medical community – he is a likable and idyllic character.
[3] However, some like Benshoff argue that Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde is different from other blaxploitation horror films in that it examines how the “good-black, bad-white dichotomy” is played in society, as Dr.
"[4] Erb believes that Pride is a “tormented black protagonist forced to negotiate racially separate worlds but destroyed in the effort.” The film shows him as a man who comes from nothing, as he was born in a brothel to an alcoholic mother.
The audience is supposed to think that he is simply looking for a remedy for cirrhosis of the liver, yet he is actually trying to help and cure the “black urban underclass.” Other characters throughout the film, like Linda, see him as an ambitious man who wants to live like the “white professional class and forget his origins,” yet those characters do not see the internal, psychological struggle that his experiences throughout the film.
[4] In other blaxploitation horror films, the monster can be considered a “racial Other” that is from a major, urban city like “New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Miami.
At the time of the premiere of Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde in Atlanta, GA at the RIALTO, he was highly regarded, as he had received critical acclaim for his role in Guns of the Magnificent Seven, Cleopatra Jones and Maurie.
Douglass found the film entertaining and he describes it as rather “comical”, as Casey throws people around and kills them easily with superhuman strength.
Linda Gross of the Los Angeles Times hated the film and described it as “rot”, with the exception of Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography and the presence of both Marie O’Henry and the Watts Towers.