Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2015)
Mr. Dark
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Starring Richard Stanley, Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer, Nelson de la Rosa
Directed by David Gregory
This screened at Texas Frightmare Weekend 2015 immediately following Despite The Gods, the documentary about similar happenings with Jennifer Lynch, and they’re odd companion pieces. While Gods plays out as a real-life psychological horror tale, this is a balls-out comedy. And that’s a good thing, because it’s relentlessly entertaining.
Richard Stanley was a hot young director in the early 90’s. After making the incredible Hardware and Dust Devil, he was a hot property and had the chance to push a dream project through Hollywood. The project he chose was a remake of The Island Of Doctor Moreau, at once more faithful to the Wells book than previous versions and also more extreme and transgressive.
This begins a journey into madness and mayhem that is captured by this documentary by Severin Films main man David Gregory. What would follow would be turned down by Hollywood if presented as a fictional script, as being just too far fetched to be believed.
Gregory managed to get nearly all of the primary players in this fiasco on the record. One notable exception is Val Kilmer, who wouldn’t even return any of Gregory’s contacts. Given his behavior on this film as described by virtually everyone interviewed on camera, that’s not a surprise.
When I say this movie is a comedy, it’s a comedy of errors. Stanley is clearly a brilliant filmmaker… but he’s also more than a little…eccentric. (That’s the nice, Texan way to say mad as a hatter.) His idea for the Moreau film, as described here by Stanley and some of his partners and shown on storyboards and concept art, would have been amazing. It might have been insane, but it would have been amazing and insane. His devotion to the original Wells novel and the brand of extreme horror shown in Hardware would have made a very interesting blend with a decent Hollywood budget. If he’d been able to make the film.
To give you an idea of just how insane things (and Stanley) get, he credits the approval of the project to a spell cast in his favor by a warlock from Brighton named Skip.
Skip, the warlock.
I’ll just let that sink in for a second.
Everything from there seems to be a downhill rollercoaster ride to hell. Stanley’s original cast comes mostly apart, replaced by Brando and Kilmer. The latter seems to have immediately regretted agreeing to the project and spent his time on set attempting to destroy the film from within. Brando seems to mean well, but is completely batshit insane by this point in his life, and comes up with modifications to his character and the script such as the ghostly white face paint and mini me presence of tiny Spanish actor Nelson de la Rosa.
By the time the phrase “and then the hurricane hit” is said, it’s clear that the film is doomed, or at least Stanley’s role at the helm, and it is.
But the film and the story don’t end there. In fact, they’re just getting interesting, as Stanley goes native a’la Colonel Kurtz and the film spirals further under the hand of the very grumpy John Frankenheimer. By the time we hit the third act plot twist (entirely true yet entirely unbelievable) we’re rolling in the aisles as disaster after disaster strikes.
Orgies, drugs, defections, and Hollywood egos collide to create one hell of a mess and one really horrible movie. Thankfully, out of it came this incredibly entertaining documentary of a story that nobody would believe if it wasn’t on film.
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Film
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