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

As fascinating as this documentary is, one is left feeling that it barely skims the surface of the madness that prevailed during the production of The Island of Doctor Moreau. Yes, there are great anecdotes about Brando being crazy or mischievous or, as one more acute observer puts it, displaying utter contempt for his own profession. You get to hear how vile Val Kilmer was. And there's John Frankenheimer stomping around like a parody of an egomaniacal old-school director. And yet you just know that there are worse stories to be told, and that there was seemingly no end to the cluelessness of almost everyone involved in this benighted shoot. So while Lost Soul is one of the better documentaries about a disastrous film shoot, I was left wanting more and wishing they'd dug a bit deeper and provided a more thorough account of the shenanigans, the treachery, the foolishness and the folly of the nightmarish six-month jungle shoot. Even so, Lost Soul is infinitely more entertaining than the movie it documents.

Behind the scenes chronicle of how clash of vision, bad creative decisions, lack of interest and really bad weather plagued the disastrous production of the infamous 1996 remake of "The Island of Dr. Moreau".

This film is great because it not just talks about the film, but also the career of Richard Stanley and how it went off the rails. Following genre cult classics like "Hardware" and "Dust Devil", Stanley could have been the biggest thing in horror. However, because of his experience here, he has done relatively little in the last twenty years.

I love that they have Tim Sullivan commenting on the "identity crisis" of New Line. Sullivan is not credited, so how much he was on set I do not know. But having talked to him myself in the past, he is extremely knowledgeable. From the vantage of a production assistant, he saw a lot of great movies get made before making his own.

Fairuza Balk is nice to have here. Her career went downhill after the 1990s, though not necessarily because of this film. It would be nice to see her make a comeback. David Hudson, the Buffalo Man, offers a nice point of view from the natives.

And, of course, we find that Val Kilmer is a total diva. Fortunately, his career has taken a complete dive and he is now seen largely as a joke. Unfortunately, if he was wise, he invested his earnings and never has to work again.

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.

Director David Gregory has a long history of behind-the-scenes documentary shorts, Lost Soul is more than just a making-of doc that would accompany The Island Of Dr. Moreau disc. Fans of cult director/writer Richard Stanley get a good insight into what makes this fascinating film maker tick.

For followers of the novel and film itself Lost Souls also covers the earlier film attempts of H. G. Wells and looks at the books core themes and origin. Gregory offers a captivating documentary with its mix of archival materials and surviving-collaborator testimonies. It wonderfully chronicles how a conflict of vision, creative decisions, lack of interest and awful weather plagued the disastrous production and destroyed friendships with entertaining stories of behind-the- scenes drama including drugs, alcohol and egos. Sadly David Thewlis or Ron Perlman do not participate and it would have been interesting to hear their views.

If you enjoyed Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) Lost In La Mancha (2002) basically other "failed film" documentaries - this is a must see.

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