Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

MartinHafer During the 1950s and 60s, John Agar made a ton of lousy horror/sci- fi films. Gloria Talbott also made quite a few as well...and in "The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll" you get to see them both together. The difference is that Talbott managed to make a few really good films in the genre--including the classic "I Married a Monster From Outer Space"--whereas Agar just seemed to have a habit of making nothing but schlock. So which is it going to be here....classic horror or schlock or something in between?The story is a confusing affair and has the basis of a good story. When Janet Smith (Talbott) arrives at her family manor to claim ownership, she learns a terrible secret--that her father was the infamous Dr. Jekyll. What follows are a series of violent murders and Janet starts to worry that she might have committed them due to some evil gene within her! Her fiancée (Agar) and a nice doctor (Arthur Shields) seem to be the only ones who will defend her, as soon the villagers begin accusing her as well.The story above doesn't sound bad, does it? And, the mood for the picture is appropriately scary and brooding. However, the writing really was a serious problem as again and again they kept mixing up stories. While Dr. Jekyll created his alter-ego Mr. Hyde, in this movie they keep talking about this story as if Mr. Hyde was a werewolf-vampire!! There's talk about Talbott turning into the creature when the moon is full and how they have to kill her with a stake in the heart!! This has absolutely nothing to do with the Dr. Jekyll story...nothing. I was almost expecting them to toss in some mummy and Frankenstein lore into the film as well!!Overall, a confusing story to say the least but it IS an entertaining one. My advice is if you see it, turn off your brain and just enjoy it without thinking through the plot too much! A bit of a disappointment for Talbott fans...and an artistic triumph for Agar fans. No, this isn't because Talbott was bad in the film and Agar wasn't...it's just that compared to Agar's other horror films this is practically "Masterpiece Theatre"!By the way, the familiar Irish character actor Arthur Shields was actually Barry Fitzgerald's brother.

martinflashback Ulmer must have dug deep to find a script this simple. Behind the daffy dialog, he clutters up his frame with all manner of junk, diligently waded through by the admirably serious actors The picture really drowns in brick a brac and set ornament, in tea cups, foam relief, fire places, fake gravestones, so on infinitely. Most of this is shot from the hip, giving the strange impression that Agar and Talbot are themselves moving furniture or hand- puppets, their secret hidden by the puppet stage floor. Every so often great mists are rolled out, lap dissolves and wipes erase or shift figures in time, and people dash through pasteboard sets shot at frightening angles. All of these effects are sequenced in a mongoloid semi- plot which moves heedlessly and energetically along like a hypnotic piece of music from Mars. Two of the best ecstatic sequences: a murder, with a memorable use of the phone, deliriously edited as if it were a Leger, and a chase over the moors at the hour of the wolf which marries tin pot Gothic to the feel of newsreel documentary. These haunting fits of grand mal guignol attack the ludicrous plot and scheme of the film, jarring the etiquette of the B- film programmer and loosing a manic poetic force on the five-and-dime proceedings. At the end, we are told the whole Carrollian thing is a just a joke, in a sort of low- rent Pirandellan bookend which makes the unreal reality of Ulmer's ecstatic rides all the more inscrutable. He certainly chose to make films like this, subordinating plot, dialog, and anything else by then considered crucial to the whole film to the giddy trapeze- swing of a perpetually moving modernism. Ulmer can't sit still. People talk about auteur films. 'Daughter of Dr. Jekyll' is far more auteur than any of the recognized 'masters'. Ulmer accepts the necessity of whatever idiotic limitation the script and budget entails and wends his way around them, through them, past them. That's why he had his say in the set design, lighting: the details excited him.... The script is irrelevant, a too- literary artifact that would one day become extinct. Ulmer made films in Yiddish, a language he didn't understand, and also movies for a black audience, both markets that were at the margins of the popular cinematic experience. Naturally, he embraced pulp horror and science fiction, a far more hospitable place for his expressionist art than the middle- brow armpit sweat of the heavy message movie. A foreigner, this is the corner where he was most at home. This Jekyll's kid film would make a good double bill with 'Meshes of the Afternoon', another fantasy of objects and mirrors that unfolds in the lunacy of the broad daylight.

gftbiloxi Edgar G. Ulmer began his career as a set designer to the famous theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt; by 1920 he was working in films, and although often uncredited labored on such legendary films as Fritz Lang's DIE NIBELUNGEN and METROPOLIS. By 1927 he was in Hollywood, and set design work led to assignments as a director. In 1934 Ulmer brought the full force of his talents upon Universal's THE BLACK CAT--a brilliantly realized film that many consider among the finest horror films of that decade. But Ulmer's affair with script girl Shirley Castle, wife of a studio executive, resulted not only in his termination at Universal but placed him on an industry-wide blacklist as well. He would never work at a major studio again.But Ulmer had a knack for getting the most out of a tiny budget, and he soon found himself in demand as a director at second-string studios and for independent productions. Between his dismissal from Universal in 1934 and his death in 1972 he would direct more than forty films, and he was often noted for his ability to bring a remarkable artistic vision to the screen in spite of low budgets and questionable casts.All that said, the 1957 DAUGHTER OF DR. JEKYLL was, according to daughter Arianne, a project undertaken for the sake of a paycheck; it is far from Ulmer's most memorable. Even so, as 1950s B-horror flicks go, it is far from the worst--in spite of tenth-rate special effects Ulmer manages to endow the movie with an entertaining atmosphere and the occasional jab of humor, and it is considerably more coherent than most of its kind.The story concerns orphaned Janet Smith (Gloria Talbott), who has now reached her twenty-first birthday and arrives at the home of her guardian Dr. Lomas (Arthur Shields.) She brings with her future husband George Hastings (John Agar), who soon wins Dr. Lomas' approval, and all seems pleasant. But Janet is in for a surprise: Dr. Lomas tells her that she is heiress to the estate, left to her by her father, the notorious Dr. Jekyll, and no sooner is Janet in residence than corpses begin to crop up. Has she somehow inherited her father's chemically-induced evil? The script here is extremely transparent, and you'll know what's going on long before Janet does. It is also more than a little odd, managing to wrap ideas about vampires and werewolves into the whole Dr. Jekyll package. Add to this extremely obvious miniatures awash in dry ice, mediocre special effects, and a cast that tends toward the obvious at every possible turn--well, the overall effect is somewhat hooty, to say the least.THE DAUGHTER OF DR. JEKYLL will never rank along side the likes of Ed Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE in the "so bad it's good" cult movie derby--Ulmer is too much of an artist to permit tipsy tombstones--but it is actually amusing in its low-rent efforts. Recommended to fans of the genre.GFT, Amazon Reviewer

silentgpaleo Or, perhaps skids is more like it. How did John Agar get such wretched work as this in between films with John Wayne? (All right, I suppose most Wayne films are schlock, too.)But, this is Dr. Jekyll's daughter. And he looks silly as her husband. This is a ridiculous Universal wanna-be, complete with a family estate and curse. The whole werewolf explaination for this curse is very contrary to Robert Louis Stevenson's original conception.But, the werewolf ploy is not enough. DAUGHTER...is so boring, that I defy anyone to sit through it twice. I was in a coma by the time the end finally came.Gloria Talbott rules, though. She is the quintessential mid-50's scream queen. She always played an able woman, but it always took a man by her side to work things out in the end(this time it is Agar). Talbott's appearances in this film and, THE CYCLOPS(the same year) cemented her image into many a Saturday-matinee patrons' mind.Is this before or after Agar divorced Shirley Temple? This is certainly not the most pickled he looked(he looks more bleary-eyed in his later, Larry Buchanan period), but he looks just a little too cheery in some scenes. Maybe he was happy that the filming would soon be over.I was glad when DAUGHTER OF DR. JEKYLL was over. Unless you're a Gloria Talbott fan, skip it.