Dr. Moreau's House of Pain

worst movie i ever saw. period. i am not kidding around here. i bought the movie used because i figured a movie with a pig-man on the cover had to be hilariously bad. me and some friends tried watching it but everything about the movie was so terrible we had to turn it off. the acting was poor at best. the characters were morons. (who would have sex with a pig man and expect it to keep a promise of freedom?) the monsters were inconsistent, in one shot it would be covered in slime-garbage and the next it would be dry. i actually had to force myself at a later time to watch the whole thing just to see how bad it was. i actually felt sick after watching this movie which has never before or since happened. this DVD became a thing we would trick people into getting it among me and my friends, i hid it in a big stuffed animal, sewed it back up and gave the stuffed animal to a friend. after awhile he discovered what i had done when i began to hint at it. he tried to get a family member to wrap it up and give it to me for xmas but my brother discovered the plot due to carelessness of my mother so my friend drove past another friends house and threw it on his lawn. it got back to my first friend somehow and he threw it in the trash, right were this movie belongs.

I cannot imagine how any sane human being could enjoy this film. Its insane crappiness induces vomiting. A man with giant knees would make more sense than the monsters in this film. Don't get me wrong, I like my share of cheesy movies, but this one was just too awful even for me. I watched this movie hoping for a fun and amusing horror flick. What I received was one of the worst moments in my life. At one point during the movie I convinced myself that if the movie did not end in less than 10 minutes, i would jam a fork in my eye. I urge anyone who finds this film on a store shelf to buy it, break it into 1000 tiny pieces, and scatter them across the ocean. If not for me, do it for the children.

Director Charles Band has pulled off a terrific bit of sleight of hand in Dr. Moreau's House of Pain. Yes there are Pig People, guts and gore, lots of nudity etc., etc., but what makes this little film special is that Band has made a terrific homage to the film noir films of the forties. Color, (did he use technicolor? the color is perfect), costumes, hair styles and dialogue are all out of 1947, and the actors play their parts as though they were Alan Ladd, Gail Russell and Lizabeth Scott! The premise is silly in this the what, fourth go-round of a Dr.Moreau film, but the execution, (no pun intended), is really top notch and on a par with much more expensive films.

Congrats Charles Band and all who worked on this film. Not to sound too 1940's, but you all did a "swell" job!

Dr. Moreau's House of Pain (2004)

* (out of 4)

Eric Carson (John Patrick Jordan) goes looking for his brother who has gone missing after visiting Dr. Moreau (Jacob Witkin). Pretty soon he sees the horrible creations caused by the doctor as well as getting lucky with the sexy panther woman (Lorielle New).

DR. MOREAU'S HOUSE OF PAIN is pretty much what you'd expect out of a low-budget movie from Charles Band. If you're familiar with Band's work then you should know what to expect here. You've basically got a very low-budget movie that is "borrowing" from countless other films. Obviously this one here is a take-off on the H.W. Wells but one shouldn't be expecting anything like previous versions of the story.

The film's small budget seems to have had most of the money spent on the actual look of the film. It's quite colorful and I must admit that it looked rather good. The biggest problem with the film is its overall tone, which is just bad and not all that entertaining. Even worse are some of the special effects and the creatures just aren't all that believable. Even worse is that you really just don't care about the lead character, his brother or any of his problems.

I will say that the one saving grace was the performance by New. Obviously she's a very beautiful woman and her nude scenes are a welcome but I thought she was also good in the role.

Searching for a hot story, a reporter joins a boxer and his girlfriend in searching for a missing friend of theirs and eventually stumbles upon a mysterious doctor harvesting victims for experiments in human/animal hybrids and must try to stop the doctor before they're the next victims.

Overall, this one was much better than expected. What works really well here is the interesting setup which works well enough on its own but has much more to like due to the period setting. That means the start of this one with the reporter looking for the big break and stumbling into the story by following the stranger from the nightclub becomes more intriguing once they find the strange mansion hideout. Offering enough twists through its inclusion of sleazier storytelling but keeping enough points from the classic story from how they stumble into the creatures, this becomes a decent starting point. This setup provides the kind of cheesy creature confrontations not just with the creations but with the doctor. The means of their capture at the mansion and subjection to the preparations that take place focus heavily on the sight and presence of the creatures keeping them in check while trying to figure out the doctors' plans. As this goes on, the finale where the escapes and double-crosses take place which leads to a lot of fun and bloody brawling involving the humans and the mutants left alive which has the advantage not only of the graphic outcomes but the effects work all giving this a cheesy vibe. These features are what manage to make this one enjoyable while there are some issues with this one. The main issue here is the films' penchant for speechifying over graphic creature carnage which causes several side factors to emerge. Not only does that approach keep the energy down and the kills barely noticeable for long stretches of time, but it also means that there are a lot of technical issues with the surgery glossed over so that it never really makes sense how they are preferred or how everything went down in that location undetected. As well, there's also the fact that this leaves us with long, uninterrupted looks at the animal masks being used which really aren't that convincing. These factors are what hold this one back.

Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, Full Nudity, and Sex Scenes.