Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau

Like Hearts of Darkness and Lost in La Mancha, Lost Soul is an excellent documentary in which the cast and crew tell the story of a troubled production.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is a serviceable, much-maligned movie about a mad scientist who combines humans and animals to make freakish humanoids. The production was infamously difficult, though the gritty details were widely inaccessible to the public.

Told through the recollection of some--but not all--of the various cast and crew involved in this movie, Lost Souls delivers the intricate story of this notorious film. Those curious about the origins of Brando's choice to wear an ice bucket on his head, or the casting and director changes during filming, are in for a treat. This doc will definitely have you grinning ear-to-ear at the nuttiness of it all.

As the title indicates, Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau (I'll just shorten that to Lost Soul for the rest of this) is the story behind the making of 1996's The Island of Dr. Moreau. Much of this film focuses on Richard Stanley's involvement with the film and how the production descended into chaos. Stanley was the driving force behind getting the project off the ground, only to be replaced as director before he could finish the film.

The Island of Dr. Moreau was a colossal flop - both financially and critically. While there are aspects of the film I enjoy (and I admit I enjoy a lot of it for the wrong reasons), there's no denying the movie is pretty much a complete train wreck. One of the more interesting aspects of Lost Soul is the recounting of events that led to the disaster. It was a perfect storm - a studio with no faith in a director; a director in over his head; a constantly growing budget; isolated locations; monsoon like weather; actors in open rebellion;- anything that could go wrong did.

Equally amazing to me is how many of the people involved in the film agreed to be interviewed for Lost Soul. From Stanley to studio head Bob Shaye to several of the actors involved to production and technical staff - you get to hear the stories of the doomed production from all sides. It's fascinating stuff.

7/10.

Having been a fan of Jurassic Park and Batman Forever as a kid, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) looked, from the TV advertisements, like the next big thing. Look at those creatures! On an island! Starring Val Kilmer and some woman (I assumed) named Marlon Brando! In fact, the film was widely panned and derided when it came out. When I saw it with my younger sister, it was more violent than I expected, a bit of a mess, but I definitely appreciated what it was trying to do. My sister totally disliked it; maybe she had better sense in this case.

Lost Soul (a title paying nice homage to the original film, The Island of Lost Souls) is an engaging documentary dedicated to studying how the film went so far off track, and it is more insane than I realized. There's some good brief discussion of the novel and earlier film attempts. Then, to the meat of the picture. I'm not even sure if I would have liked Richard Stanley's original vision; the sketches are exceedingly trippy and the thought of the protagonist getting his genitals bit off during bestiality is so far out there. It's still fascinating to see what went wrong.

A lot of it is bizarre- the fact that Stanley went to a witch doctor to make sure he stayed on the film, and the fact that he credited it with working, says it all. You can see the injustice in Stanley finally being fired because it was raining, according to this documentary (I heard it was because of Kilmer), but then, there's definite evidence he had broken down, going by this anecdote that he had climbed a tree and wouldn't come down. It's really striking how many people came onto the project, or stayed on, despite not wanting to be there. The gong show goes on- Kilmer and Brando locking themselves in their trailer and refusing to come out until the other does. One person remarks it would be a huge achievement to finally have a film with a beginning, a middle and an end- they succeeded. I think I would have enjoyed this doc even more if I was in total agreement that The Island of Dr. Moreau sucked- but certainly, the making of it was a trainwreck, too fascinating to look away from.

The making of the 1996 version of "The Island of Dr. Moreau" was such a disaster that articles, books and documentaries have been made about it, like this 2014 documentary "Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau." Stanley championed the film, wrote the screenplay and was set to direct, but was fired after a few days of shooting after conflicts with Val Kilmer, who wasn't in the best of moods due to being served divorce papers while on set.

Actually that wasn't the main reason Stanley was fired. He was fine for small indie productions, but he was out of his league with a blockbuster like this. In his defense, the movie didn't start as a blockbuster, but simply a few notches more swanky than Stanley's previous two Indie flicks. Veteran filmmaker John Frankenheimer had to be brought in to save the production from being an utter loss. He got the job done, but his tyrannical approach didn't help matters.

The situation was so bad that Fairuza Balk (the cat-lady, Aissa) literally tried to escape the remote set in Cairns, Australia, but she was caught at the airport in the nick of time. Add to this constant rewrites and Brando's well-known eccentricities, not helped by the recent suicide of his daughter, Cheyenne, and you have a formula for cinematic chaos!

The fact that a semi-coherent, somewhat entertaining movie was made from such a debacle is remarkable. But this documentary is far more interesting and amusing. It's on par with similar docs, like "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse" (1991). Some notables of the cast & crew unfortunately weren't interviewed (Kilmer, Ron Pearlman and David Thewlis), but more than enough were to accurately and entertainingly paint the picture of what went down.

The film runs 1 hour, 37 minutes.

GRADE: A

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau (2014)

**** (out of 4)

If you watch enough movies, eventually you're going to see something that takes you by complete surprise. You can hear about how bad or crazy a movie is but there are certain examples that just stick in your mind because once you've seen the movie in question you realize that you really have seen something that's so bad that you have to sit there for days if not weeks wondering how it went so wrong. That happened to me in 1996 when I walked out of THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. Being a major Marlon Brando fan, it was a thrill getting to see him on the big screen but what was on that screen went down in infamy and here's a documentary explaining the craziness.

Director David Gregory is one of the best people out there when it comes to making DVD/Blu-ray shorts so throwing him into the feature world is something great for movie fans. This documentary is so perfectly done that it plays just like a real drama, a tragedy and then finally a hilarious comedy. We start off hearing from Richard Stanley who talks about his original ideas for the film and we see that he clearly has a great vision for the story. Then, we see that there's something off when he begins to talk about calling on witch doctor's to "help" the film. From here we learn just about every bit of the production details from how the film was originally meant to be made for $8 million but then Brando came on board, which had the budget go higher so then they needed a star so Val Kilmer was brought on and soon the original director was gone and replaced by maverick John Frankenheimer.

LOST SOUL: THE DOOMED JOURNEY OF RICHARD STANLEY'S ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU is without question one of the best documentaries that you're ever going to see when it comes to explaining the behind-the-scenes of a troubled production. However, to be fair, this here wasn't just a troubled production because you're going to learn that the entire thing seemed to be cursed and you can't help but wonder why the entire film wasn't dropped early in the production but then you learn that perhaps someone just wanted to see how crazy it could get. Things turn even worse when you hear that even Brando and Kilmer wanted the production to fail and some of the stories are just downright crazy. There are so many wild and crazy stories told about the production of this movie by the time it's over you can easily see why the actual movie turned out so bad.

There are way too many highlights in this film so picking out one or two to put the spotlight on is rather hard. Again, being a die-hard Brando fan, finding out what was going on with the white face paint and the ice bucket on his head were hilarious. Hearing about how the fired Stanley managed to get back onto the set and work as an extra was just astounding. What's the best is the fact that so many people came back and were willing to talk about the troubled production and be honest about it. Of course, Brando and Kilmer weren't available but Fairuza Balk is on hand as his New Line's Robert Shaye and of course Stanley plays a big part here. There's also some of the original producers to discuss the problems and the honesty of everyone involved is what makes the drama of the film work so well.

Of course, as the craziness continues and just gets weirder, the film pretty much turns into a comedy because you have to laugh at everything that was going on. Gregory has once again created a wonderful little gem and one hopes that his talents will see for more feature-length documentaries because he's one of the best out there and LOST SOUL is so great that it actually makes me want to go back and what that train-wreck of a film that was THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU.