Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's “Island of Dr. Moreau” (2014)

From my favorite movies..

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

For anyone interested in film making this sounds like it would be a great documentary about how the production process can be an insane, stressful, eventful and horrible experience. The documentary was quite successful in showing what a seemingly horrid experience everyone had making this film once they went into production. The beginning was interesting as we see most of it from Richard Stanley's POV as he writes the film then tries to get it financed. The middle bit starts interesting as they go into production then all the problems start (disastrous weather that stops the shoot, actors that pull out that then get replaced by control-freak actors etc.)Then Stanley loses control of his film and gets fired. Once Stanley is no longer the focus of the documentary it goes a bit off track and becomes quite boring as we get too many clips of Fairuza Balk, extras and unimportant staff such as one of the limo drivers, who all talk way too much about uninteresting things. The doc started to flag at the 45 minute point and after an hour I began to feel a bit bored and drained. Plus in all fairness, compared to production tales from other films that I've read about (e.g. the likes of which you'll find in Lloyd Kaufman's Make Your Own Damn Movie book), this didn't sound that crazy. The biggest issues seemed to be the weather (not very interesting) and Val Kilmer's ego (equally uninteresting). So, sounded like it would be great but turned out to be a bit of a bore.

A documentary about the making of the abomination known as "The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)". Great stuff about the absolute chaos of production of the movie. From actors with huge egos (Val Kilmer, Marlon Brando) through problematic location and people getting fired, to absolute crazy behavior that is like taken from a mad house movie.If you liked documentaries like "Lost in La Mancha (2002)" and "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)" which tell the story of some crazy movie productions, you're going to love this one. Incidentally, there are quite a few more connections between "Dr. Moreau" and "Apocalypse Now", which are mentioned in this documentary.

Behind the scenes chronicle of how clash of vision, bad creative decisions, lack of interest and really bad weather plagued the disastrous production of the infamous 1996 remake of "The Island of Dr. Moreau".This film is great because it not just talks about the film, but also the career of Richard Stanley and how it went off the rails. Following genre cult classics like "Hardware" and "Dust Devil", Stanley could have been the biggest thing in horror. However, because of his experience here, he has done relatively little in the last twenty years.I love that they have Tim Sullivan commenting on the "identity crisis" of New Line. Sullivan is not credited, so how much he was on set I do not know. But having talked to him myself in the past, he is extremely knowledgeable. From the vantage of a production assistant, he saw a lot of great movies get made before making his own.Fairuza Balk is nice to have here. Her career went downhill after the 1990s, though not necessarily because of this film. It would be nice to see her make a comeback. David Hudson, the Buffalo Man, offers a nice point of view from the natives.And, of course, we find that Val Kilmer is a total diva. Fortunately, his career has taken a complete dive and he is now seen largely as a joke. Unfortunately, if he was wise, he invested his earnings and never has to work again.

Like Hearts of Darkness and Lost in La Mancha, Lost Soul is an excellent documentary in which the cast and crew tell the story of a troubled production.The Island of Dr. Moreau is a serviceable, much-maligned movie about a mad scientist who combines humans and animals to make freakish humanoids. The production was infamously difficult, though the gritty details were widely inaccessible to the public.Told through the recollection of some--but not all--of the various cast and crew involved in this movie, Lost Souls delivers the intricate story of this notorious film. Those curious about the origins of Brando's choice to wear an ice bucket on his head, or the casting and director changes during filming, are in for a treat. This doc will definitely have you grinning ear-to-ear at the nuttiness of it all.