Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau
Director: David Gregory
(Amazon/iTunes/Google Play)
B+
If Hardware auteur Richard Stanley had his way, his adaptation of the H.G. Wells sci-fi novel he loved as a child would have featured such shocking scenes as a human man engaged and engorged in foreplay, sucking the many nipples of a panther woman.
But, as we know, he didn’t; New Line Cinema replaced the in-over-his-head Stanley with veteran John Frankenheimer (1962’s The Manchurian Candidate), and the tortured result, 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, tanked. Today, the colossal boondoggle is regarded as one of the worst movies ever made. Personally, I think that’s a bit harsh, but whatever it is, at least it finally yielded some good, nearly two decades after the fact, with Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, a documentary of What Went Wrong.
A whole helluva lot! That’s why, even with so many of its players dead or absent, Lost Soul can clock in at feature-length. Admittedly an outsider, Stanley is forthright about the mistakes he made before his dismissal; chief among them, he recalls, “I then made another strategic error: I met Val Kilmer.”
While Stanley is pegged as passionate and paranoid from both his supporters and detractors, no one has nice things to say about Kilmer. Then at the height of his Hollywood powers, the Batman Forever star was, by all accounts, an asshole forever. Further poisoning the well was the legendary Marlon Brando, bringing with him an ego larger than his don’t-give-a-shit girth.
Those stories of bad behavior are well-documented. What justifies Lost Soul’s existence is director David Gregory, co-founder of the Severin cult-video label and contributor to The Theatre Bizarre, allowing more time for anecdotes that didn’t make Variety’s front page. For example, before a single frame was shot, New Line toyed with taking the reins from Stanley and giving them to Roman Polanski; understandably frustrated, Stanley did what he had to do: Enlist a genuine warlock on the other side of the world to cast a spell exactly as the filmmakers met in Tinseltown.
Giving lip service to both sides of the fray, Lost Soul may be executed as a glorified DVD extra, but it’s no puff piece. Between this and 2013’s Jodorowsky’s Dune, the case could be made that any high-profile picture that ends up unmade — or not as intended by its original shepherd — deserves a documentary about it as a severance package.
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This random movie review escaped from the archives of Flick Attack.
