cult film freak: MARLON BRANDO & VAL KILMER RUIN 'THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU'

Written by James M. Tate / 11/02/2024 / No comments / creature , horror , john frankenheimer , marlon brando , nineties , science-fiction , val kilmer

MARLON BRANDO & VAL KILMER RUIN 'THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU'

11/02/2024 | No comment

Val Kilmer in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU Year: 1996 Rating: **

As the story goes, original director and screenwriter Richard Stanley was fired from THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, replaced by veteran John Frankenheimer who, prone to making action movies, seems confused whether it's an aggressive PLANET OF THE APES creature-uprising prequel or the quirky sci-fi/horror that the quirky Richard Stanley probably intended...

What's really strange is that big-budget superstar Bruce Willis was going to star in that original arthouse horror... replaced with offbeat British actor David Thewlis, seeming more like he'd be Stanley's choice over Frankenheimer's, who would have been able to do a high-octane Bruce Willis flick with his aged-eyes closed... meanwhile the more ambiguous Thewlis allowed the strange story to unfold before his vulnerable eyes as opposed to Willis (or Rob Morrow even), who would probably seem far above and beyond the situation... Thewis is there for the audience and the story...

Fairuza Balk in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU

But overall, what you heard is true: THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU IS a complete mess with little flow... but there are a few stories and performances inside the noisy bedlam that stand out...

Again, Thewlis's central character and especially his relationship with the titular mad scientist's feline/human daughter Fairuza Balk is involving, and while there's more brimming passion than actual simmering chemistry between the two (they don't have enough scenes together), you'll want to know how it all pans out...

Marlon Brando and Daniel Rigney in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU

Meanwhile the scene-stealer is the most aggressive of the mutant hybrids in an actor who died soon after as Daniel Rigney (the film's revolutionary APES franchise Caesar surrogate), along with sneakily cerebral house-servant Temuera Morrison, have enough primal energy to headline their own feature without the human-expository-spouting first hour...

Where on-set-scoundrel Marlon Brando infamously plays Dr. Moreau who, based upon a character liken to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness Colonel Kurtz adapted into APOCALYPSE NOW, actually performs with an awkward, nebbish overbite and bookworm spectacles like in John G. Avildsen's forgotten thriller THE FORMULA...

Val Kilmer in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU

Also like APOCALYPSE is Val Kilmer (the biggest pain to both the original and replacement director) basically playing Dennis Hopper's hippie sidekick but with none of the offbeat humor/spontaneous charm that Kilmer began his career with in REAL GENIUS or TOP SECRET... instead he seems as bored in the role as he was on the set...

And so does the usually-intriguing Brando (looking like POWDER after an eating binge), listlessly going through the motions while poor David Thewlis, as hard as he tires in the stranger-in-a-strange-land-role, seems lost in an entirely different picture — while those beasts rule the second half in both plot and passion that Richard Stanley probably intended in his dreams of bridging low-budget b-genre and mainstream sci-fi, but, without the right catapult... and like those creatures... DR. MOREAU is a disastrous creation seeking both logic and reason.