The Island of Dr. Moreau by John Frankenheimer (review)

United Nations agent Edward Douglas (David Thewlis), sole survivor of a plane crash in the Java Sea, is rescued by a passing boat and tended by Montgomery (Val Kilmer), who takes him to an island owned by his employer, the mysterious Dr. Moreau (Marlon Brando). Recovering from dehydration and exposure, Douglas is soon aware that he is a prisoner on the island, which is inhabited by creatures neither animal nor human. Despite Moreau's paternal attitude to his 'children', it is clear that these natives are getting restless.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is the third official film adaptation of H.G. Wells's 1896 novel, following the unsettling Island of Lost Souls (Kenton US 1932), starring Charles Laughton, and Don Taylor's bland version (US 1977) with Burt Lancaster. Coinciding with the book's centenary, the $35 million movie proved a flop, dogged by rumours of a troubled shoot and derided as a misshapen patchwork to match anything created in Moreau's House of Pain. The project originated with writer-director Richard Stanley, who scored a cult hit with Hardware (UK/US 1990), an apocalyptic sf horror film, but ran into difficulties on Dust Devil (South Africa/UK 1992), a dreamlike serial killer movie plagued by production problems and barely released to cinemas. The Island of Dr. Moreau should have marked Stanley's progression into big-time filmmaking yet proved a bigger nightmare than Dust Devil. Fired after a few days filming, his vision was lost in a maelstrom of ego clashes, tantrums, rewrites and general chaos. The casting of Marlon Brando as Moreau, which could have been a major coup, was instead cited as an example of the once brilliant actor's long slide into self-parody. Co-star Thewlis compared the experience to 'being in the middle of a mental asylum' and rated the finished film 'the biggest pile of bullshit I've ever been involved in' (qtd Sawyer 30). Trimmed for a PG-13 rating in the US, the film was released on home video in a director's cut - surely a relative term given the circumstances - but a substandard transfer. This Blu-ray reissue, though light on extras, offers a notable upgrade in picture and sound quality, affording an opportunity to revisit this flawed yet fascinating film that (almost) makes up in lunatic grandeur what it lacks in coherence.

While The Island of Dr. Moreau warrants reassessment, there is limited mileage in (re)constructing it as 'A John Frankenheimer Film'. In the 1960s, Frankenheimer, a veteran of live television, emerged as a major new director, with films such as All Fall Down (US 1962), Birdman of Alcatraz (US 1962) and The Manchurian Candidate (US 1962), only for his career to decline within a few years, despite a fleeting comeback with French Connection II (US 1975). At the time of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Frankenheimer had re-established himself in television and was not the most obvious choice to take over the struggling production. While he had played with sf and horror themes in The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds (US 1966), he stumbled with Prophecy (US 1979), a clumsy eco-horror movie. The Island of Dr. Moreau offered some scope for exploring his thematic interests (alienation, abuse of power, individualism versus conformity, manipulation and transformation), yet Frankenheimer was more concerned with damage limitation and crowd control than shaping the material and performances to his satisfaction.

What Frankenheimer does contribute is a high level of craftsmanship, a quality easily overlooked yet glaring in its absence. He conjures a pervasive sense of imprisonment, from the animal cages and locked doors to a high-angle medium close-up of Douglas shouting from a barred window. Frankenheimer also makes assured, un-showy use of the Steadicam and provides some prowling beast people POV shots. Douglas's first glimpse of the boat's crew has a dreamlike, hallucinatory feel, the silhouetted figures manlike yet not clearly...