1976’s Dr. Black, My Hyde tells the story of Dr. Henry Pride (Bernie Casey).

Dr. Pride is a respected doctor, the head of a free clinic in the Watts district of Los Angeles.  He has a big house.  He has a fancy car.  With Dr. Billie Worth (Rosalind Cash), he is researching a serum that will help people with cirrhosis to regenerate the tissue of their liver.  Of course, Dr. Pride wasn’t always rich.  In his own words, he and his mother grew up in the guest house of a brothel.  But now that he is rich and successful, some people claim that he’s lost touch with his community.  As a prostitute named Linda (Marie O’Henry) tells him, “You talk white, you think white, you probably drive a white car.”

In a scene that is designed to bring to mind the horrors of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Dr. Pride considers the ethics of injecting his serum into his patients without warning them that there might be consequences.  Billie warns him that what he’s thinking about doing would be not only unethical but illegal.  Dr. Pride questions whether ethics matter when dealing with something that could potentially save lives in the future.  After Dr. Pride injects an elderly black woman with the serum, she turns into a white-skinned monster who attempts to strangle a nurse before promptly dying.  Despite this, Dr. Pride continues to develop the serum and eventually, he tries it on himself.

Under the effects of the serum, Dr. Pride becomes a white-skinned madman.  (Bernie Casey wears a white makeup whenever he plays this film’s version of Mr. Hyde.)  Under the influence of the serum, Pride rampages through Watts, killing prostitutes and pimps before transforming back into the Dr. Pride.  The police are investigating the murders but they’re searching for a white man.  Meanwhile, Dr. Pride continues to obsess on trying to work out the kinks of her serum.  He wants Linda to be his latest test subject.

Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde is a blaxploitation take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and, as with many blaxploitation films, the subtext is frequently more interesting than what actually happens on screen.  Dr. Pride, after continually being accused of acting white, takes his serum and soon literally becomes white and sets out to kill the prostitutes and the pimps who remind him of his life before he became a doctor.  And while it’s easy to see this as an example of the serum turning a good man into an evil monster (the classic Jekyll and Hyde formula), it’s also true that, even before his transformation, Dr. Pride views his patients as being potential test subjects.  For all of his talk about helping people, Dr. Pride maintains his distance from the members of his own community.  Is the serum turning Dr. Pride into a monster or is it just revealing who Dr. Pride truly wishes to be?  Given the film was directed by William Crain, who also did Blacula and who, unlike a lot of Blaxploitation directors, actually was black, it’s easy to believe that the subtext was intentional.

Of course, subtext aside, Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde is a cheap-looking and haphazardly edited film.  Much of the acting is amateurish but Bernie Casey gives a strong performance as both the repressed black doctor and his violent, white alter ego.  Cheapness aside, Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde is a frequently intriguing film.