Before going into this movie I had no idea it was a part of the CRITEREON collection. After finishing this movie, I was amazed I had never really heard anyone else talk about this gorgeous little gem of classic horror.
Island of Lost Souls is a 1932 American pre-Code science-fiction horror film, and the first sound film adaptation of H. G. Wells' 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. Produced by Paramount Pictures, the film was directed by Erle C. Kenton, from a script co-written by science fiction author Philip Wylie. It stars Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Bela Lugosi, and Kathleen Burke.
After his ship goes down, Edward Parker is rescued at sea. Parker gets into a fight with Captain Davies of the Apia and the Captain tosses him overboard while making a delivery to the tiny tropical island of Dr. Moreau. Parker discovers that Moreau has good reason to be so secretive on his lonely island. The doctor is a whip-cracking task master to a growing population of his own gruesome human/animal experiments. He does have one prize result, Lota the beautiful panther woman. Parker's fortunes for escape look up after his fiancée Ruth finds him with the help of fearless Captain Donohue. However, when Moreau's tribe of near-humans rises up to rebel, no one is safe...
As a big fan of Robert Eggers film THE LIGHTHOUSE, this movies opening feels wonderfully familiar. The boxy aspect ratio, the ship floating through the fog, and that classic fog horn blaring its wonderfully creeping monotone shrieks. It’s a wonderful way to set this movies pre-code dark tone, which strangely mingles with the slapstick fight that follows. When Parker fights with the freighter's drunken captain for his mistreating M'ling, a passenger with some bestial features, the captain tosses a hilarious Parker shaped dummy overboard into Montgomery's boat bound for Moreau's island. This is one of those movies that’s concept is so ridiculous it becomes inadvertently funny at parts, but the strong under current of racsism keeps things from being to jovial.
When the film was reviewed in 1932 by the relatively permissive pre-Code era Hays Office, it was passed, noting that some state censorship boards might object to a line that suggests Dr. Moreau knows what it was like to be like God. Instead, 14 states fully rejected the film for that profane statement and its full acceptance of the then-controversial theory of human evolution. I mean come on, are we all totally fine with a whip cracking white dude living on a small island and using the natives for his cruel experiments? Doesn’t that ring a bell or two? There is only so many times you can watch THE JUNGLE BOOK without realizing exactly why all the monkeys “want to be like you”, and its almost laughable people would get there panties in such a twist about Moreau vibing with god compared to all the blatant racism evolution.
If that’s not enough craziness for you, The OG novel is considered one of the earliest depictions of the science fiction motif "uplift" in which a more advanced race intervenes in the evolution of an animal species to bring the latter to a higher level of intelligence. At the time of the novel's publication in 1896, there was growing discussion in Europe of the possibility of the degeneration of the human race. Increasing opposition to animal vivisection led to formation of groups like the National Anti-Vivisection Society in 1875, and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898. The Island of Dr. Moreau reflects the ethical, philosophical, and scientific concerns and controversies raised by these themes and the ideas of Darwinian evolution which were so disrupting to social norms in the late 1800s.
Needless to say this movie is one massive loaded question, and its hard to separate those ideas from an otherwise beautiful piece of classic cinema. As a movie its suffers from the standard 1930s slowness, but it has one of my favorite endings of the whole decade.
Should a movie be judged on how enjoyable it is to watch, or the conversations it starts?
7/10
Comments