August 23, 1996

I don’t remember knowing anybody else like this, but I loved THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU at the time. It was a big summer movie, hugely expensive by New Line Cinema standards, but it was sci-fi horror, and rampant with outstanding Stan Winston makeup effects. It had more of Fairuza Balk fresh off of THE CRAFT, but this time she grows cat fangs. I knew that Ron Perlman (CRONOS, THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN) was under the makeup of the goat man called “The Sayer of the Law,” and Mark Dacascos (CRYING FREEMAN) was the leopard man Lo-Mai, but I didn’t know who Temuera Morrison (BARB WIRE) was yet so I didn’t know it was motherfuckin Jango Fett as the dogman Azazello. A great character I’ll come back to in a bit.

The crucial thing about the movie is that it was defiantly, extravagantly weird. Watching it now I realize how much of it tonally and texturally reminds me of NIGHTBREED, but since it starred two big time movie stars it wasn’t marketed as weirdo shit. It was marketed toward a mainstream crowd, and they didn’t like it. Nor did any of the other crowds. But sometimes you gotta stay away from crowds.

There are many possible criticisms of the movie, a few I might even agree with, but the popular one that to this day infuriates me is the claim that Marlon Brando is bad in it as Dr. Moreau. Unsurprisingly he won the Razzie and Stinkers Bad Movie Awards for Worst Supporting Actor, so for the record that’s the company you keep if you hate this performance. The way they talked about it at the time it seemed like it wasn’t a performance, it was documentary footage of Marlon Brando misbehaving. Why is he on set wearing white makeup and a weird hat, riding a popemobile, making weird speeches, playing a piano duet with a little mutant pal? How unprofessional! He was supposed to be the normal version of this character. Why did he do it unlike anything we’ve ever seen? Why must he be so captivating and bizarre and hilarious? What an embarrassing bungle, that they accidentally did this. I want to talk to the manager. I’m calling the cops. I’m going to sue.

Gary Thompson in Philadelphia Daily News: “with comical dialogue that can only have been meant to elicit laughter.” Oh, you think so? You think so?

I just can’t fathom this opinion that being weird was a failure. It’s up there with “STARSHIP TROOPERS is fascist” as one of the most flagrantly off-base common movie takes of the ‘90s. And I don’t think the conventional wisdom has changed much. So I guess it’s hard to use this movie to support my Slam Evil Summer thesis that the movies that were popular then were not as good or interesting as many of the ones that were overlooked and seen as fiascos. But I know it’s true. I feel it deep in my human DNA.

That’s the baseline understanding I need to establish: Brando is brilliant in this movie, and I don’t care if you attribute it to him being off his rocker or what. He made that character, this is a gift to the world. In fact I think in 2026 it’s even better than it was in 1996 because we’ve had so many reminders that this can happen. A person of great power can silo themselves off in their own world, become more and more detached from reality, and more full of their own bullshit. He’s a great physicist so he decides he’s also qualified to be a law decider and spiritual leader.

Since almost everyone on the island is an animal-human hybrid of his creation they have no idea what normal human behavior is, they just have his example. The only other human is his assistant Dr. Montgomery (Val Kilmer, HEAT), who after ten years of this shit is not exactly a model normal person either. Into this world comes the control group, the castaway Edward Douglas (David Thewlis, DRAGONHEART), who theoretically is the audience surrogate whose eyes we discover all this craziness through. But since this a weirdo movie we prefer the strange people and identify with the strange monsters, so Douglas plays to me like Edward Woodward in THE WICKER MAN – the uptight visitor whose discomfort with all this is comical.

I reviewed THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU when it was less than a decade old, back in 2004. Not my best work, but I made the very true point that “THIS IS A PICTURE THAT OPENS WITH A KNIFE FIGHT ON AN INFLATABLE RAFT. Two minutes into the picture, a guy has been eaten by a shark and David Thewlis has beat another guy’s face in with a plastic oar.” Douglas has spent 3 days adrift in the Java Sea after his small plane crashed, and pretty soon those are gonna seem like the good old days.

He’s rescued by a boat with one American on it, Dr. Montgomery, and it’s funny that Kilmer was originally cast as Douglas, because Montgomery ended up being much more of a Kilmer character. He’s a degenerate beach bum who aids Douglas by shooting him up with “a little Jimi Hendrix” after admitting he’s “more of a vet” than a doctor. Later he brags about adding methamphetamines, morphine and shrooms to the inoculations. It’s easy to imagine the generic version of this character who wouldn’t keep me constantly wondering what’s up with this guy? I prefer this.

Montgomery is an accomplished neurosurgeon who dedicated himself to Moreau’s research, ended up just kinda being his servant, has now lost his shit enough he’s decided to become the chaos agent who knocks over the first domino toward the island’s downfall by serving Edward meat in front of Moreau’s “children.” It’s against the rules and it’s a deliberate act of provocation, whether or not he knew it would inspire Lo-Mai to kill some rabbits and be put on trial and then for Azazello to misunderstand what The Father wants and put him down and then for the Hyena-Swine (Daniel Rigney) to notice an implant on his cremated remains and to start a movement of clawing out their own implants so The Father can’t control them with pain anymore and they can take over the island.

When all that does happen, though, Montgomery responds in kind of Jim Morrison fashion, lounging on Moreau’s throne at a beast orgy, passing out drugs, doing his Dr. Moreau impression. Also destroying the serum that prevents the animal people from reverting to beast form.

Man, there are so many wild parts in this movie that I didn’t even remember all of them after multiple viewings. I forgot that Douglas finds out about the animal-human hybrids by sneaking into a lab where some of them are delivering a llama-woman’s baby. Not an easy thing to take in all at once. And I really had no memory of the part where he tries to steal a boat to leave but gets swarmed by little humanoid rats. Reminded me of DEAD ALIVE, but they’re digital – the only CG creatures in the movie besides Lo-Mai when he jumps. They’re creepy, though. They work.

Douglas’ reaction to Moreau’s daughter Aissa (Balk) is pretty funny. When he’s first arrived on the island, before he even knows about the animal people, he sees her bellydancing and just sits down and watches until she opens her eyes and is startled. She acts as sort of the Ruby in THE HILLS HAVE EYES, the sympathetic family member who tips him off about things, and he never exactly makes a move on her. But he caresses her face, notices her cat features, tells her she’s not like the others. He has little reason to believe that other than she’s the only pretty female on the island. I’m not saying I wouldn’t do the same, so it’s a funny commentary on men. And it makes the scenes at the dinner table even better because he’s sitting next to her and it kinda feels like his first time meeting the crazy family of the girl he likes.

When Edward sees Moreau’s animal children all dressed up and serving food he’s openly disgusted, can’t even couch it in concerns about ethics, just makes it clear he finds them disgusting. And Balk calls upon her facial mega-acting gifts to bug her eyes out at his reactions. Meanwhile Moreau acts like the calm, reasonable guy, at first thinking it’s his sunblock that upsets him, then explaining the philosophy of his genetic tinkering, with a brief interruption to tell little Maiji (Nelson de la Rosa, RATMAN) to take his foot off the table.

Every Moreau scene is a classic in its own right, especially his final one, when the Hyena-Swine and friends break into his residence at night, and he surely understands that they’re there to kill him, but he calmly offers them biscuits, says that their banging on the keys of his piano was “rather interesting” and “reminded me of a man named Schoenberg,” and sits down to play for them. It’s partly a distraction to try to get to the device that he doesn’t realize will no longer incapacitate them, but also I think he believes he can win them over with his charm. It’s such a tense scene. And the way that Maiji is sneaking around trying to help the doctor, and knows his safe combination! I bet he thinks he’s next, like Corpus Colossus when the Citadel falls in FURY ROAD.

I can’t write about this movie without taking a minute to sing the praises of Maiji, who would be a great cinematic creation if he had been planned from the beginning, but it’s even better when you learn that Brando saw 2’ 4” tall de la Rosa and knew he should be more than a background monster. Wikipedia says he’s “a homunculus of Dr. Moreau who does not speak and was created from a fusion of pig DNA and human DNA.” He’s delightful whether scurrying around dressed as Moreau, or dancing on Montgomery’s Jeep naked, when we see he actually has a hot-dog-like tail (or a dong hanging off his ass?).

The idea of taking one of the world’s smallest men, giving him full body creature makeup and using him as an unexplained sidekick is pure analog movie magic. Of course he also inspired the character of Mini-Me in AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME, and I would argue that that was less a parody than a celebration of what a fun concept Maiji is. I’m sure many never knew the reference, but enjoyed the weirdness of Dr. Evil having a small, identically-dressed friend.

But I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated Azazello enough. I always loved his weird look, some kind of a wolfboy trying to dress up nice, unable to tame the wild shock of hair exploding from his scalp, but there’s so much more to him. He seems so proud to be one of Moreau’s top stooges. He works as a surgeon but also “enjoys a hunt” – chasing the others when they go rogue. He has the fanciest suit, carries himself the most upright. Even after fucking up and shooting Lo-Mai dead when Moreau had just forgiven him, he holds his head up arrogantly. When they cremate the body he seems to enjoy the smell. When he eventually joins up with the rebels he still wears his formal outfit, maintains his posture, teaches others how to use guns. All the things that make you human, he must think.

I used to kinda drop out as it gets into the animal uprising part of the movie, but maybe it hits different now. Creatures climbing on top of cars, driving around blowing shit up, taking machine guns and blowing the shit out of every diploma and Nobel Peace Prize and shit on the walls of Moreau’s study, later everybody combing through the wreckage and destroying things even more, poor M’Ling (Marco Hofschneider, EUROPA EUROPA) stumbling around dazed like Mother Sister after the riot in DO THE RIGHT THING.

The narration and stock footage at the end is heavy-handed with its moralizing, and some of the themes of the movie are very obvious (some of them mentioned in my original review). But 30 years on I see other applications of the story. Moreau certainly has parallels to the tech lord oligarchs currently terrorizing the world – the claims of a grand mission, the bizarre lifestyle, the complete detachment from reality, the soul-less exploitation, the reckless disregard for consequences. Also that all this stems from his insistence on skirting the law and avoiding criticism. Moreau left the States because of animal rights activists protesting his experiments. “It got so bad you couldn’t cage a rat without reading him his rights,” Montgomery jokes. All these regulations. All this wokeness.

John Hartl of The Seattle Times and William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote the two most positive reviews on Metacritic (rated 75 and 67), so maybe it’s a Seattle thing. Maybe we just get it here. We have some islands and tech people and stuff. Actually, David Ansen of Newsweek gets it: “Brando’s performance is enormous fun, but it’s not just a joke. He’s hilarious and gently mesmerizing at once, and director John Frankenheimer savvily adjusts the tone of his movie to fit Brando’s daft brilliance. This update of H.G. Wells’s 100-year-old novel is – until it collapses in the last 30 minutes – giddily entertaining, a tropical-horror potboiler with a wry sense of its own absurdity. Any movie that casts gnarly, intense David Thewlis as straight man is going to be pitched at a pretty baroque level.”

You said it! We’re lucky Rob Morrow got fed up with the madness and quit. Now, how it would’ve been with first choice Bruce Willis? That I cannot imagine. (He bowed out so as not to leave the country during divorce proceedings.)

Along with my fascination for THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU came a fascination with the stories of its troubled production. Legends of original director and credited screenwriter Richard Stanley, coming off of HARDWARE and DUST DEVIL, trying to inflict his sensibilities upon the mainstream with this movie, struggling with the hurricane of Kilmer changing his mind about starring, plus an actual hurricane destroying the sets. And of course Stanley was fired after 3 days of shooting and replaced by the great John Frankenheimer. The real kicker was the part about secretly staying nearby and spying on the set disguised as a dogboy extra. There was such a mystique around him and this movie.

And yet I didn’t jump to see David Gregory’s documentary LOST SOUL: THE DOOMED JOURNEY OF RICHARD STANLEY’S ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU when it came out in 2014. Like JODOROWSKY’S DUNE it seemed made just for me, a major documentary about a niche topic that had long captured my imagination. But I was bothered by all the reviews that presented it like hey, remember that movie that sucks and no one likes and is worthless, well here’s a funny story about how it went wrong, how they fucked over the most visionary genius of all time, who was going to make a movie that would’ve changed the world and turned water to wine and shit to gold, but they robbed us of it, to make that bad movie that is really bad, can you believe it? And I felt like I was the one and only person saying hey, wait a minute.

I considered Stanley an interesting director at the time. I was excited to see him do a studio movie, I thought it was gonna be subversive or something. But… in my memory at least, not having rewatched them, his movies aren’t that good. How can I believe he would’ve made a movie better than Frankeneheimer’s when, to my mind, he never had before? I didn’t see many people vouching for them based on having actually seen them. They were just assuming they must be amazing because that’s the underdog story we all believe in, the genius screwed over by The Man, because we can’t have nice things.

So I kept delaying watching LOST SOUL, because along with it I wanted to watch and write about all of Stanley’s movies, to prove or disprove my theory. Very likely it would turn out I saw them too young and they’re much better than I remembered. I was excited to find out, and when he had his comeback with THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE I swear I was about to finally get around to it. Then his former partner and screenwriter Scarlett Amaris posted a horrific account of suffering years of abuse from him, which she said she decided to go public with after another partner filed charges against him. If you search for it now you’ll find Reddit posts claiming he was cleared of the allegations (source: Richard Stanley), but if you read her story and think “this is the kind of thing women make up and put their names on to smear the obscure director of 3 okay cult movies” then I don’t know, man. I don’t know. (Actually I do. But I’ll be nice because you got this far in my review.)

Point being, the Richard Stanley retrospective is permanently cancelled, but Slam Evil Summer inspired me to finally watch LOST SOUL, which is as interesting as hoped. Of course, today’s knowledge prevents me from being charmed by Stanley croaking out his cheeky stories about how outrageous his ideas were. At no point in his interviews is he able to suppress his “I’m a clever boy” smile, which is less cute now that we know he beats up women.

But we didn’t need this information to see that the guy is a kook. He proudly tells the story of when he was told he was going to be replaced by Roman Polanski so he “resorted to witchcraft,” contacting “this warlock chappy in England” who, at the moment Stanley was meeting with Brando, “convened his coven, cut his arm, drew a sigil and did some sort of routine to fix it and make it all right.”

Would a guy who really believes and/or does shit like that and thinks it’s an impressive story to tell make a good movie? Maybe, yeah. Crazy people sometimes make the most exciting art. But I don’t think it’s the sure thing people portray it as. The transgressive ideas he brags they wouldn’t let him do to do don’t all sound that great, and one of the story contributions he insisted on was having the beasts take over earlier than previous adaptations, the main thing everyone complains about. Even some of the people interviewed who are sympathetic to him say that he was in over his head. Executive producer Tim Zinneman (THE JERICHO MILE) says, “He would come on surveys and talk to people, but as a leader and director he really didn’t get involved. He stayed in his house.” Production designer Graham “Grace” Walker (MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME) says, “We’d have to drag him to look at locations and even meetings. He wouldn’t come to meetings… I really liked the guy alot but I kept saying to him, ‘Hey Richard, you’ve got to go to meetings if you’re going to make this movie’… I think he did have visions, whether they were clear, I’m not so sure. He would probably say he did, and perhaps I misinterpreted some of what he was saying, but I never thought they were exactly clear.”

At one point he says that Grace joked about blowing up the set, and laughs that New Line worried he wanted to sabotage the movie. But later he says that he immediately started shredding documents because he “wanted to make it particularly hard for them to make that film.”

To his credit, though, his script is the basis, he was there for the development of the monsters, the supporting actors seem to have really liked him, he seemed to care about having good relations with the locals (appointing the Bison Man actor David Hudson [SINGAPORE SLING] as an ambassador to the aboriginal community). And on the negative side about Frankenheimer, all the interviewees seem to agree he was an asshole who yelled at them.

Marco Hofschneider, who plays M’Ling is one of the main interviews. His character was Montgomery’s assistant in the book and original script, but Kilmer didn’t want to be overshadowed by a creature, so the part ended up being much smaller than he signed on for. He was clearly very disappointed, but seems to have a sense of humor and surprising amount of objectivity about it. Balk, on the other hand, is still upset about the betrayal of a director she believed in and her disillusionment as a young actor to find that she had to just go along with it.

At the end of the documentary nobody says anything good about the finished product, ashamedly parroting claims about it being the worst movie ever made. The happy ending is Stanley having found some kind of peace living in mountains away from people, doing some “strange experiments” and feeling optimistic about making another movie, more modest than MOREAU. He did do that one and post-sort-of-cancellation he soldiers on, so far not hooking up with Ben Shapiro like other alleged abusers, but he shot some kids’ movie with Cynthia Rothrock and wrote WINNIE THE POOH BLOOD AND HONEY 3.

This dark turn in the saga has inspired one final reading for this 30-years-later viewing. Like I mentioned earlier, I instinctively side with the freaks, even if the movie doesn’t entirely (see Fairuza in THE CRAFT). I don’t mind these beast people going overboard in their search for freedom. But some of them immediately want to be the oppressor themselves, and Stanley is a reminder that that’s true, that some of these guys are not on our side, to not be surprised that some of the weirdos, outsiders and artists are just as bad as the other guys.

Once we expel them we can’t necessarily continue exactly what we were doing. We might have to rethink some things, try to learn and evolve in the ways we continue in our search to find the life we want. I like at the end when The Sayer of the Law, who once commanded everyone to walk on two legs, refuses Douglas’ help to stop the beast-people from regressing.

“We have to be what we are, not what the Father tried to make us,” he says. What they are is up to them to discover.