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

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

  • Status: Released
  • 24-08-2014
  • Runtime: 98 min
  • Score: 6.7
  • Vote count: 115

The story of the insane scandals related to the remake of “Island of Dr. Moreau” —originally a novel by H. G. Wells—, which was brought to the big screen in 1996. How director Richard Stanley spent four years developing the project just to find an abrupt end to his work while leading actor Marlon Brando pulled the strings in the shadows. Now for the first time, the living key players recount what really happened and why it all went so spectacularly wrong.

Richard Stanley

Self

Kier-La Janisse

Self

Michael Gingold

Self

Graham Humphreys

Self

Edward R. Pressman

Self

Robert Shaye

Self

Tim Sullivan

Self

Tim Zinnemann

Self

Fairuza Balk

Self

Bruce Spaulding Fuller

Self

Marco Hofschneider

Self

Rob Morrow

Self

Graham 'Grace' Walker

Self

Fiona Mahl

Self

Neil Young

Self

David Grasso

Self

Peter Elliott

Self

David Hudson

Self

Hugh 'Lewis' Dickson

Self

Oliver Dickson

Self

James Sbardellati

Self

Jack Wareham

Self

Paul Katte

Self

Nick Nicolaou

Self

Cheyenne Brando

Self (archive footage)

Marlon Brando

Self (archive footage)

Joseph Conrad

Self (archive footage)

John DeLuca

Self (archive footage)

Stephen Earnhart

Self (archive footage)

John Frankenheimer

Self (archive footage)

Val Kilmer

Self (archive footage)

Burt Lancaster

Self (archive footage)

Charles Laughton

Self (archive footage)

Henry Morton Stanley

Self (archive footage)

Ron Perlman

Self (archive footage)

Roman Polanski

Self (archive footage)

Jürgen Prochnow

Self (archive footage)

Barbara Steele

Self (archive footage)

Ruth Vitale

Self (archive footage)

H. G. Wells

Self (archive footage)

James Woods

Self (archive footage)

Wuchak

***Account of the troubled production is far more compelling than the movie*** 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