Rish Outfield's reviews
This was a fascinating idea for a film. It was pulled off rather well, too. The whole time, however, I was wondering what a modern version would look like (of course, I know there is a modern version, with Stan Winston monsters and colours and violence Val Kilmers and Marlon Brandos, but I also know it has Fairuza Balks in it, and that's something I cannot accept). I think it was because I saw the FOUNDATION of a great movie here, but not that movie. The idea, as I said, of an island where a scientist has been speeding up the evolution of animals until they are almost human, is very interesting, with many doors it opens. I found few of them explored here, probably due to limits of the time and budget.
For an island so remote no one would ever bother the Doctor in his experiments, it sure was easy for people to find it. Still, I had to give this sucker skulls for something. This film had the fewest skulls of any I've reviewed, but it was definitely Horror, back in a day when it wasn't a bad word (who knows, they might have called them Creature Features back then, to avoid the inflammatory H-word).
The cast was both remarkable and unremarkable. The male lead was the bold, flawless, purely masculine hero of all pre-television action/horror films, and I never felt anything for him or cared about the character. Bela Lugosi was unrecognizable as the Sayer of the Law, but it was good to hear his weird accent again. There was the dumb old cringing, screaming girl part that was as useful as an underwater blowgun, but the other female character was cool. The opening credits touted her only as the name The Panther Woman! She was pretty neat, and surprisingly sexual for the time. Charles Laughton stole the show as the egocentric, god-complexed Dr. Moreau. His speeches were both logical and crazed, intelligent and inane, and it was fun to watch him every time he spoke. All of the other characters, however, were relatively bland and stereotypical, except for the one man-beast that had compassion. The animal-men weren't very scary, but their bloodlust at the end certainly was. In fact, Moreau's demise, though mostly off-screen, was chilling, even by today's standards.
In the end, as I ineloquently stated, I thought this was a story with great untapped potential. It wasn't a classic, but I think a classic could be made from it. I don't know, maybe I should just read the book.