Director: Erle C Kenton
Stars: Charles Laughton, Bela Lugosi, Richard Arlen
Snack Report: Chocolate cake (Birthday celebration)
Viewing Companions: Alex, Danica, Zelda
Tonight’s feature was supposed to be Val Lewton’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943), an early example of the ambulatory corpse genre with authentic Haitian voodoo zombies.
Unfortunately, technical difficulties intervened, and the disk would not play. Therefore… it was time for Plan B. We replaced our Val Lewton feature with an Island Adventure of a different kind – Erle C Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls (1932) – one of the most controversial pre-Code science fiction/horror films.
Based on the 1896 novel “The Island of Dr. Moreau” by HG Wells, the island is where banished scientist Moreau (played with sadistic glee by Charles Laughton) experiments on living men, turning them into hideous mutant man/animal hybrids. Wells himself disapproved of the film because he felt the filmmakers emphasized the sadism and horror rather than the novel’s philosophical aspects.
It was difficult to get the film made, and it was opposed by the studio and various censorship organizations throughout its production and upon its release. The film was banned in the UK until 1958 (as well as in numerous other countries and parts of the US) for blasphemous dialogue (“Do you know what it means to feel like God?”) and taboo topics like human/animal chimeras, vivisection, and interspecies sex.
When it was eventually released on DVD in 2011 by the Criterion Collection, it was given a mild PG rating… my, how times have changed.
The acting is no great shakes except for Laughton, who hams it up heartily, obviously relishing the role of the evil scientist. And I couldn’t help but notice that Laughton’s Dr. Moreau bears a strong resemblance to SCTV’s Dr. Tongue (Proprietor of the 3D Houses of Stewardesses, Cats, Beef, and Dr. Tongue’s Evil House of Pancakes).
To promote the film, Paramount staged a contest to cast Lota, the Panther Woman, and over 60,000 women entered. The winner, 19-year-old dental assistant Kathleen Burke, in the end wasn’t so happy about it. She couldn’t escape the Jungle Girl typecasting, and after a very short career soon left show business in frustration.
Though he gets prominent billing, Bela Lugosi played a small role (“Sayer of the Law”) only because he was in bankruptcy proceedings and really needed the money. Not that you’d recognize him anyway, as his face is covered with werewolf hair
***
It all begins with shipwreck survivor Edward Parker (Richard Arlen), grateful to be rescued by a passing cargo ship. But something’s not quite right. The ship is overflowing with brutish apelike men and dozens of dogs and caged wild animals, to be delivered to a mysterious destination.
When Parker gets on the bad side of the creepy drunken captain, he’s unceremoniously tossed overboard at the first port of call – one of those tiny uncharted islands you hear so much about, and the final destination of the ships’s strange cargo. Dr. Moreau and his crew begrudgingly take Parker back to the island with them.
Turns out the beastly men (there are no women in sight) are the natives on the island, and they’re kept in line by Dr. Moreau with his House of Pain and lavish application of a whip. (Indiana Jones he was not, but Laughton actually was pretty skilled with the whip, having already mastered it for a stage role.)
Soon, Dr. Creepy comes up with a brilliant idea – keep Parker around for further experimentation; specifically, mating him with Lota the Panther Woman (the only woman on the island) to create a perfect human/animal hybrid offspring… which was enough to make censors’ heads explode.
Yet the ending of the film comes as no surprise. Back then, you knew that the good guys would always win, the evildoers would be punished, and order would be restored to the universe.
But even back in those repressed days, some were more open-minded. According to IMDB, Elsa Lanchester (famous as the Brides of both Frankenstein and Charles Laughton) is said to have stated “Of course it’s against nature. So is Mickey Mouse.”