By Quin
David Gregory has very few feature film credits on his resume. Perhaps the most well-known is a segment in the anthology film The Theater Bizarre from 2011. Almost every other title in his long list of credits are documentary shorts. It turns out that he is responsible for so many of those Making Of documentaries that you get on the extras of a DVD. His feature length documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau is basically a longer Making Of documentary, but it’s one of the best. And the thing that makes it so surprising is that it’s the Making Of documentary you never knew you wanted to see – but, trust me, you want to see this. You need to see this.
In the early 90’s, fresh off of Hardware and Dust Devil, Richard Stanley began preparing a screen adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. He had been a huge fan of the book, and while he liked the Charles Laughton adaptation with Bela Lugosi titled Island of Lost Souls, he points out how much that version deviated from the book. He also completely rails against the 1977 version with Burt Lancaster, amusingly talking about the misleading movie poster that featured a woman to cat transformation that doesn’t even happen in the film. The misleading poster art is obviously an age old problem that we still see today. Now, Richard Stanley is almost 50. He looks like an older, heavier version of the man he was in the 90’s, even with the same wardrobe. As he sits in a study in front of a shelf of books, he smokes cigarettes and speaks while brown saliva forms in the corners of his mouth. We get to hear directly from him – as well as some of the people he briefly worked with – as to why his vision never made it to the screen and he was quickly replaced by veteran director John Frankenheimer (best known as the director of 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate.)
I have only seen The Island of Dr. Moreau once, and I must say that is enough. It’s widely considered to be a terrible film. This documentary goes into great detail to explain what went wrong, even beyond the involvement of Richard Stanley, which incidentally only lasted a few days into shooting in Cairns, Australia. In addition to the history, this film attempts to weave and perpetuate a mythology around the film that, over time, could make it as infamous as films like Poltergeist or Twilight Zone: The Movie. Some of this stuff is documented and agreed upon by those who are interviewed – New Line Cinema’s Bob Shaye, actors Rob Morrow and Fairuza Balk, as well as many other actors and members of the Australian crew. Some of the more bizarre stories are recalled by Richard Stanley and I take them all at face value. He talks about a friend of his named Skip, who performed some kind of ritual with blood and incantations that was supposed to make everything go according to his plan during film production. He also blames an injury that this friend had as the thing that unraveled the magic spell and caused the chaos leading to his dismissal.
Most of the people interviewed in the film actually seem to feel bad for Richard Stanley. Fairuza Balk says that they were friends and that she didn’t understand why things got so messed up. Some are diplomatic – like Bob Shaye. He clearly thinks Stanley is a weirdo. This is obvious when he talks about an early meeting where refreshments were offered. Stanley requested coffee with four or five sugars. Shaye saw that as a warning of a guy who might be trouble.
It’s worth mentioning the people who are not interviewed in this film. Producer Mike De Luca is only represented as an animated figure and the film doesn’t make him look very good. The most bad-mouthed is probably Val Kilmer and he’s not in this movie. The other three who are missing are all dead – 2 foot tall actor Nelson De La Rosa, the once great Marlon Brando and director John Frankenheimer. It would be nice if they could have defended themselves, because they all get some strong accusations thrown their way. But when you see the final outcome of the film and take into consideration all of the things the people who were there had seen, it’s hard to not believe it all.
In about May or June of 1996, I was at a horror convention in Los Angeles where they were promoting the release of The Island of Dr. Moreau. I was much less critical in those days and it was easy for me to get excited about new movies coming out. John Frankenheimer was actually at this convention and I’m pretty sure Stan Winston was with him. They showed a reel of behind the scenes footage of the making of the film. I remember most of it being about the makeup effects, showcasing all Stan Winston’s designs. This was the first time I saw the Pig Woman. Perhaps if I had been older and wiser, I would have noticed from the film reel that something fishy was going on. But they were there to drum up interest and sell tickets. There were smiles and there was gushing about how great it was that Marlon Brando was in the film. There was no mention of the hell they had just gone through, and there was definitely no mention of a Mr. Richard Stanley.
Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau is now available on iTunes from Severin Films. It is also streaming on Netflix.