The Island of Dr. Moreau: A Review

THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU

This review is part of the Summer Under the Stars Blogathon. Today's star is Marlon Brando.

Divas to the left of me. Crazies to the right. Sometimes, the divas and crazies switch places and were even one and the same. The bonkers behind-the-scenes stories during the filming of The Island of Dr. Moreau have become infamous. Fired directors who had nervous breakdowns. Actors who accidentally repeated police reports as if it were actual dialogue. Other actors who fled or attempted to flee the filming location. Those wild stories range from the amusing to the terrifying. However, what about the film itself? Separate from the eccentric anecdotes, how is The Island of Dr. Moreau as a movie? 

Told occasionally in voiceover, we start with Edward Douglas (David Thewlis). He is the eventual sole survivor of a plane crash on the Java Sea. Edward is a United Nations negotiator who is close to finding peace with warring nations in the region. However, it is not the U.N. that comes to his rescue. Instead, it is the Ombak Penari, a small ship that came across Edward's raft. Aboard is Dr. Montgomery (Val Kilmer), who first tells Edward that he will be dropped off on Java. However, they end up on what Montgomery calls "Moreau's Island", where Edward reluctantly agrees to go.

Montgomery appears somewhat hospitable. That hospitality, however, includes locking Edward in his guestroom. Why would Montgomery make Edward a de facto prisoner? Who is the beautiful woman dancing in the courtyard? The answer to the second is Aissa (Fairuza Balk), who says that she is Moreau's daughter. The answer to the first is a shocking secret. Montgomery is helping give birth to new creatures who are half-man, half-animal.

Edward, aided by Aissa, flee to a village of these new mutants overseen by the Sayer of the Law (Ron Perlman). This blind half-man/half-goat creature speaks the words of the Father. Edward now comes face to face with the mysterious Doctor Moreau (Marlon Brando). He is the mad scientist who has created his "children" with varying degrees of success. Montgomery is his hands at the various surgeries. Edward is appalled at Moreau's activities but his efforts at escape flop.

One creature who does not escape is Lo-Mai (Marc Dacascos), who has violated Moreau's laws about killing other creatures. He's disposed of with Azazello (Temuera Morrison) violating another law: shooting him. Moreau controls his creatures via electroshock implants inside of them. Montgomery also controls them with various shots that allegedly are to stop them from regressing but which he adds some marijuana. However, by now one of the creatures, Hyena-Swine (Daniel Rigney) has uncovered the implant and removed it.

The mutants are revolting, leading to a cascade of butchery and death. Which of the three pure humans (Moreau, Montgomery and Douglas) will survive the growing chaos on the Island of Misfit Monsters? 

It is approximately twenty minutes into The Island of Dr. Moreau before Marlon Brando appears. When he does, I would not blame anyone watching from having one of two reactions. He or she will either sit in stunned disbelief or burst out into laughter. Those are probably the only logical reactions to seeing Kabuki Brando arrive on his version of the Pope-Mobile. 

It does not get any better for Brando. His performance is one for the ages in that it somehow transcends goofy, bypasses loony and lands on Bizarro World. Actually, even on Bizarro World, Marlon Brando's performance would be seen as flat-out bonkers. Brando's first appearance has him in garish white makeup and all-white ensemble, looking like the illegitimate child of the Abominable Snowman and Frozen's Olaf.

His appearance then shifts to his speaking. That does not improve matters. Brando adopts a very curious accent, presumably British but the type more suited to a P.G. Wodehouse adaptation than an H.G. Wells one. He is quite foppish in his manner, with grand gestures and an air of not being fully aware of where or even who he is. I will give credit where credit is due. Marlon Brando does seem to play it oddly straight when Moreau is surrounded by beast men waiting to lunge at him.

Even here, when the animals are revolting against Father, Marlon Brando looks as if he either doesn't care or doesn't seem aware of anything. Sometimes though, one flat-out laughs at how broad Marlon Brando is (and no, that is not a fat joke).

The height or nadir of Brando's gonzo acting comes in what should be a curiously tender scene. Aissa has come to Moreau for help. She is slowly transitioning to animal (Aissa being the most human-looking of his creations). There we see Marlon Brando, usually ranked among the greatest actors of all time, with an ice bucket on his head. He tells Aissa that his "caloric converter" is empty, requiring her to dump ice directly into Moreau's head. The entire scene, I think, is meant to be a tender heart-to-heart between Aissa and Moreau. Instead, one could not help but to laugh at the hilarity of the "caloric converter".

Caloric converter probably is one of the saner elements in The Island of Dr. Moreau. The mad doctor has with him one of his favorite creations: Majai (Nelson De La Rosa). One never knows why he is almost always at Moreau's side (we do get to see this tiny figure nude when Montgomery is vaccinating the various creatures). This attachment to Majai is an unexplained whim. Majai later became the inspiration for the character of Mini-Me in the Austin Powers franchise. Majai adds nothing to whatever plot Ron Hutchinson and the film's former director Richard Stanley had. Then again, I don't know if The Island of Dr. Moreau had an actual script or director. Technically, the latter role was filled by John Frankenheimer. Visually, it's anyone's guess if someone was overseeing this madhouse.

Marlon Brando didn't embarrass himself in The Island of Dr. Moreau. He didn't humiliate himself. He looked like he was too whacked out to even be aware of what he was doing. His performance is such that one can believe the stories that Brando repeated police reports accidentally picked up through his earpiece as if it were actual dialogue. Brando does not appear to know anything about reality if one judges by his performance. 

As bad as Brando was, and he was bad, his two other costars were hardly better. David Thewlis did embarrass and humiliate himself as Edward Douglas. While Marlon Brando was acting on a whole other planet, Thewlis was not bothering to show his utter contempt for everything to do with the film. Brando may have slipped into some alternate universe, but Thewlis was one-note throughout. One can watch Marlon Brando as some kind of bizarre avant-garde acting style he was doing for his own eccentric amusement. One cannot watch David Thewlis as anything other than looking and sounding irritated.

A mild defense can be made owing to a lack of script. However, David Thewlis never convinced anyone that he was genuinely shocked or horrified at the demonic experiments going on. His character says that this is a mad and evil world that Moreau has created. Edward, however, never seems to believe anything that he says. One can say that it is wrong to create human/animal hybrids. Thewlis, however, never delivers his statements with any conviction. It is pretty sad that someone apparently cannot make the case why bestiality is wrong. 

Then we got Val Kilmer. He seemed to act as if the whole thing was crazy and it was best to be crazier. Given the reports of intense animosity between Kilmer and Brando, one imagines that the former enjoyed mocking the latter when Montgomery goes mad. However, in that short time period when Montgomery is the new Father, he looks less crazy and more bored. I think Kilmer may have tried to be menacing. He might have tried, but he failed spectacularly.

It is unfortunate that Fairuza Balk gave the most honest performance in The Island of Dr. Moreau. She is the only major player to appear to at least try to make any of this remotely plausible. It is probably the best performance in the film because she steered clear of what doomed her male costars. She did not make Aissa a whacked-out loon (Brando), a bored actor (Kilmer) or an angry actor desperate to get out (Thewlis). Ron Perlman was basically sad as the Goat-Boy. One often forgets that he is there or what his purpose is.

The film is confused about itself. Its efforts to be deep end up looking goofy. We start with a fistfight between the other survivors of Edward's doomed flight. "They fought like beasts, not men", we hear in Thewlis' voiceover. That's not subtle foreshadowing. The film ends with footage of various fights, again pushing the "man is really a beast" theme that it thinks it is communicating. "You all killed the Father. You all ate the flesh", Douglas somewhat mockingly tells Hyena-Swine when the latter appears close to demanding worship. My guess is that even atheists would roll their eyes at The Island of Dr. Moreau's pretentions of intellect.

The Island of Dr. Moreau has exactly two good things in it: Fairuza Balk and Gary Chang's score. The music is strong and effective in its effort to make things ominous and thrilling. Like Balk, Chang's score was making the effort. Apart from those two aspects, The Island of Dr. Moreau is a film that one watches almost in stunned disbelief at how laughable it all is. I figure that it may be revived as a cult film. It is not a "so bad it's good" film. It just gives mad scientists a bad name. 

DECISION: D-