The Island of Doctor Moreau x2

Island of Lost Souls (1932)

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

Greetings, boils and ghouls, and welcome to Spooky Season! I’m not the biggest fan of that title, but if it functions as a way to get people in the Halloween-scary-vibe-spirit, then I’m all for it. Summer is officially over and we have finally arrived at my favorite time of year—for movie-watching and for everything else—when the weather gets better (in theory) and the leaves change color and the sun hangs low in the sky. I always begin my horror movie double-feature-watching a week before October begins, because I am simply too much of a giddy, goofy freak who cannot wait any longer. I realize that spooky season isn’t for everyone. Some people do not like horror, some people prefer the bright sun and the warm weather, and some tire of pumpkin-flavored everything, but that is not me. To quote Bowen Yang, Fall is the one that got a way. It is the shortest, sweetest, most romantic and mysterious time of year, and I can’t help soaking it up for all that it has to offer a mediocre writer and witch such as myself. I have always adored horror movies, as comedian Chris Fleming says, it’s like taking my anxiety to the dog park. The controlled setting of a tense, terrifying horror film is just as much fun to me as it is genuinely cathartic. In my over four years of writing this blog, horror movies have always been a staple, and this year I have tried my best to curate the most diverse and dark horror double features yet—so let’s begin, shall we? Last year I kicked off the horror double feature extravaganza with some classic, campy Joan Crawford Slashers, and in the same spirit of honoring the classics, this year I wanted to dive into a classic scary story that has been in and around the Hollywood horror movie machine since the 1930s. This is acclaimed science fiction writer H.G. Wells’ iconic novel from 1896: The Island of Doctor Moreau. It follows the lone survivor of a shipwreck, who finds his way to a mysterious isle where a disgraced scientist and his monstrous creations reside. The novel covers a myriad of themes such as pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, humanity’s relationship with nature and with ourselves, and it all makes for a fascinating, chilling, thrill ride of mad scientists, heroes and heroines, and an entire island of human-animal hybrids forced to reckon with their own existences. It’s a story so shocking and mysterious that it makes sense that Hollywood wanted to bring it to life, but by the time director Erle C. Kenton was hired on to direct Island of Lost Souls, issues had already begun to bubble up. Both the script and the director in charge had been changed several times, and a plethora of on-set snafus occurred. During one scene, an extra who was dressed as a beast-man reportedly got too close to the bars of a tiger's cage, leading to the tiger nearly tearing his arm from its socket. The boyfriend of the actress playing the Panther Woman (Kathleen Burke) started coming with her to work, which eventually led to a fist fight between him and the director. And when the film was finally released in late 1932, the trouble didn’t cease. Paramount wanted to reissue Island of Lost Souls in 1935 but it was denied a re-release due to the recent invention of the Hays Code. The camera negative of this film was lost; the film had only survived through a handful of positive prints that varied in quality. (The Criterion Collection had combined two 35-millimeter prints and had collectors' copies of some missing frames. Criterion's president Peter Becker said their restoration of the film for home video was "one of the most challenging reconstructions and image restoration jobs we've ever done.") And, as with all good movies, Island of Lost Souls was banned in numerous countries, including: Germany, the UK, Hungary, India, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and Tasmania. After all of the trials and tribulations it took to get this film made, the original author, H.G. Wells, was apparently not at all pleased with it, saying in a 1935 interview, “(It’s) terrible! (The story was) handled miserably. With all respect to Charles Laughton, who is a splendid actor, and others concerned in the making of this moving picture... I must say that it was handled with a complete lack of imagination. No subtlety was used in the creation of the dreadful atmosphere. The whole thing was so ridiculously obvious that I must repeat—it was miserable.” The ironic thing is that Island of Lost Souls, the first in a line of cinematic interpretations of this story, is the most subtle and clever one. It packs so much story and intrigue into its 70-minute runtime, and made excellent use of veteran actors, first-time actors, stunt people, and some of the most ambitious makeup and costuming brought to film at that point. The cinematography is absolutely breathtaking, as the camera pays special attention to shadows and contrasts, featuring the gorgeous architecture and set design, and highlighting the heavily-expressive, 1930s-faces each performer presented. This film just glows and shimmers and terrifies you, all at the same time. To think of the risks they took to get tigers and gorillas and foxes to behave on camera, must’ve been a feat that I don’t want to even know about. Richard Arlen is a fine leading man as Edward Parker, the shipwrecked protagonist. Leila Hyams was also fine as Parker’s fiance who is forced to save her damoiseau in distress from this hellish island, Kathleen Burke as the Panther Woman was a welcome new addition to this story that didn’t previously feature this character, and Bela Lugosi (at this point in his career, bankrupt) also makes an amazing cameo. But who really sells this frightening story is horror legend Charles Loughton, who plays the titular and terrifying Dr. Moreau. There are elements to this character that are absurd, and even cartoonish, but Loughton was the sincere, professional, passionate foundation of this wild film. It’s a bonkers movie that is paced elegantly and performed wonderfully, and while it didn’t include every part of the original story, Island of Lost Souls is one of the scariest film of this era. There is much to fear and question in this tale, and very little sympathy warranted for its isolated mad scientist who is eventually torn apart by the very beings he designed. Island of Lost Souls is a bold attempt to bring this bewildering story to life, and its version of this bio-anthropological nightmare paved the way for countless science fiction stories and films that have followed. There was another film adaptation in 1977, starring Burt Lancaster as Dr. Moreau and Michael York as the male lead, and I’ve yet to see this attempt. But oh man, if only H.G. Wells could’ve seen John Frankenheimer’s 1996 adaptation of his most beloved story. One of the most chaotic, confusing, unsubtle attempts to bring it to the big screen, that resulted in money lost, careers ruined, and as it stands currently, it has scared any other creator away from ever attempting to tell this story again. There is no concise way to explain the difficulties and despair that brought this batshit movie to life, but it all began with the vision of Richard Stanley—an exciting and unique indie director who dreamed of making this story the right way. The path to hell is paved with good intentions, though, and no matter how hard Richard Stanley worked to make his dream movie, the studio and his cast kept getting in the way. The 2014 documentary Lost Souls: the Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s “Island of Dr. Moreau” details the miserable, maddening making of this film better than I ever could—and I must require that you view it if you ever wish to see this wacky film—but to make a long story short, we have Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando and the cowardly execs at New Line Cinema to blame for this shitty movie. All of the ingeniously creepy concept art Stanley designed for the creatures of this film, scrapped. All of the intriguing plot points and side characters Stanley wanted to explore, cut. And between the constant changing of the cast, the script, the filming location, the very core and ethos and tone of this film, Richard Stanley went rightfully insane and was eventually fired from the movie he dreamed up. Val Kilmer, at the height of his fame, was cast as the leading man: the shipwrecked protagonist. But he decided that he didn’t want to film for that long, so he decided to switch roles and play Dr. Moreau’s right hand man, Montgomery. David Thewlis was then placed in the lead role, and with all due respect to Mr. Thewlis, everything about his aesthetic and demeanor screams “mad scientist’s right hand man”, not necessarily “leading man”. Val was a menace on set who was rude to the crew—he even set a cameraman’s sideburns on fire. But the real diva of this cursed shoot was infamous-diva Marlon Brando, who pretended to respect this work and Richard Stanley’s specific vision, only to spend every moment of his time trying to sabotage it. Some truly horrific hiccups occurred: a PA was bitten on the hand by a poisonous spider, resulting in her flesh melting. The island they were filming on was hit by a hurricane, severely damaging sets. Val Kilmer was chain-smoking and picking fights with people, daily, for no reason. Marlon Brando performed racist impressions to the cast and crew, had his lines fed to him through an earpiece, insisted on tweaking his part constantly, and was dead-set on having a diva-off with Val Kilmer. Both men refused to leave their trailers until the other one would, forcing hundreds of extras in heavy makeup and costumes to wait outside in the Australian heat for hours, at times not even filming that day. Out of a star-studded cast—Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer, David Thewlis, Ron Perlman—only Fairuza Balk (who plays the Panther Woman) was loyal to Stanley and wanted him to stay on to direct. When John Frankenheimer was brought on as Richard Stanley’s replacement, he admitted that he hated the script and didn’t typically make movies like this, but he needed money after making several cinematic flops. For all of these reasons, and hundreds more that I haven’t the time to list, the 1996 adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau is the sloppiest, weirdest, most disjointed and delirious adaptation of them all. For an already strange story, the 1996 film is somehow weirder and more gimick-y than it needed to be. The special effects makeup of the spliced humans was the most effective, memorable part, and these were just bastardized versions of the concepts that Richard Stanley created. It all feels like one, big, expensive, dangerous slog, where Val Kilmer cannot stifle his bored expression and Marlon Brando enters the film wearing bizarre white makeup and a hat full of ice, while riding in a creature-drawn safari-style Pope-mobile. The subtle horror and chilling existentialism of the 1932 film is completely lost here, and is replaced with pure, machismo ego and the desire for profit over plot. The editing is bizarre and jarring, the creatures that were meticulously designed are hardly even shown, and the inconsistent way this story is fleshed out makes it all so much more confusing than it should be. You’d think that the 1996 version of a film would have more scares and spooks than the 1932 version, but you’d be wrong. When we see Charles Loughton carried off by his creations to be dismembered and experimented on in an ironic twist, there is palpable fear. But when Marlon Brando shuffles his way around his creations and is only implied to be killed, off screen, there is no fear, but only frustration to be felt. Perhaps the most satisfying part of this monstrosity of a movie is when Val Kilmer tells one of the creatures that he wants to go to “dog heaven” and a creature just unceremoniously shoots him in the head. One hundred years after H.G. Wells wrote this story, director Richard Stanley only wanted to do justice to this ambitious and complex story, and what we got instead was a passionless, disorienting, ball-busting attempt to make a blockbuster. The making of this film is a far more interesting and terrifying horror story than Brando could ever fever-dream-up, and I’m sorry to say that it’s good that he’s not around to fuck up any more movies. The Island of Doctor Moreau would appear to be a story as cursed as Macbeth but I do kind of hope someone tries to tell this tale again, not just because it’s compelling and creepy on its own, but because I can only imagine what kinds of problems would sprout up if this was attempted in this day-and-age. I wonder if Marlon Brando or Val Kilmer or the cowards at New Line Cinema ever realized how ironic their macho posturing(s) of power were amid this story that is famously about the hubris of man, but I digress. I thank you for reading along this week, dear reader, may your next island vacay be monster-free, and may your ambitions lead you to victory, rather than hell. Let’s chat next week, my spooky friends.