So what specific Mr. Hyde-like effects does drinking the psychic brain fluid from a mass murderer have on the bookish lady scientist, you ask? For starters, she magically develops dark blue eye shadow, red lipstick, rouge on her cheeks, and silver nail polish. It corrects her vision so that she no longer needs those bookish glasses. It inspires her to let her hair down and dress in a leather two-piece number so that she looks like someone at a Xena convention. She develops the ability to wield unspecified and unexplained blasts of light. Most importantly, she develops the personality of a megalomaniac sex kitten capable of controlling the minds of others and has a psychic link to the mass murderer, who actively encourages her new persona to aid him in his quest to destroy the very fabric of human civilization. That's some formula, huh?

Dark Queen is an astoundingly bad take on the traditional Jeckyll and Hyde theme that is practically boiling over with laughably bad acting and howlingly bad dialogue. If not for the occasional moments of stupefying badness, there would be absolutely nothing redeeming about the movie whatsoever. It's just dreadful on every level. The script is total gibberish, the directing is utterly lifeless, the acting is embarrassingly amateurish, and the quality of the production values often go back and forth between looking professional and looking like a public access television production. Even though Dark Queen was obviously meant to be campy that still doesn't change the fact that the only really amusing moments are so for unintentional reasons.

Okay, the movie does have one other thing going for it – breasts. Then again, even though just about every major female character pops her top at least once there's still a shocking lack of sex in this movie, and that strikes me as being especially odd since the plot is seemingly tailor made for a film of the Cinemax After Dark variety. It just feels like it should constantly devolve into soft core sex scenes that go on for several minutes at a time. I wish it did, not just to see ample flesh bumping and grinding but also because it would have cut down on the seemingly endless amount of dull talky scenes and general lameness of the production. This is a movie with very little action going on and not just of the sexy variety.