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| 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/indie British actor David Thewlis, seeming more like Stanley's choice over Frankenheimer, who would have been able to do a high-octane Bruce Willis flick with his aged-eyes closed...
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| Fairuza Balk in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU |
Well what you heard is true: THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU IS a complete mess with absolutely no flow... but there are a few stories and performances inside the noisy bedlam that stand out...
Thewlis's central character's relationship with the titular mad scientist's feline/human daughter Fairuza Balk is somewhat involving, and while there's more brimming passion than actual simmering chemistry between the two, you'll want to know how it pans out...
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| 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...
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| 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.
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| Val Kilmer in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU |
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| David Thewlis in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU |
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| Marlon Brando in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU |
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| Marlon Brando in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU |
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| Temuera Morrison and Marco Hofschneider in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU |
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| Val Kilmer in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU |
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| David Thewlis in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU |
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| David Thewlis in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU |
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| Similar-looking Marlon Brando in The Formula and The Island of Dr. Moreau |
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| Fairuza Balk in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU |
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