Dr. Ravi & Mr. Hyde (Comedy)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C+     Extras: C-     Feature: C+

 

 

Ravi Godse’s Dr. Ravi & Mr. Hyde (2007) is not any kind of send-up of Robert Louis Stevenson’s literary classic Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, but a silly comedy about a doctor (director Godse, who may be one in real life) who has a sort of midlife crisis that makes him suddenly want to make a film.  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is great for medicine, but is far from ideal for filmmaking with no serious film community and rare legitimate production, but that will not stop him.

 

The result is a series of vignettes about all the people he goes to see and discuss the situation with.  Who can he get to help him?  Can he get finding?  Who has such money?  What will he make it about?  Are darker interests trying to stop him?  Will that stop him?

 

This ends at 87 minutes before wearing thin, but has some amusing moments, though not enough to sustain a feature.  Maybe if he was playing a guy doing this more seriously instead of bouncing around like Woody Allen, this could have really worked.  Unfortunately, it seems like a personal project that lucked out in getting a distributor.  It is not very memorable, but if you see it, you know you’ve seen much worse.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image was shot on digital video (likely older digital High Definition) and the result is a soft, but consistent image throughout.  Still, it can be watchable with all of it’s off the fly location shooting.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo is simple and not perfect with varying location recordings.  Still, the combination is better than many such projects we’ve seen.  The only extras are previews of this and other Inecom product.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo