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The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)
Rate:
1
Viewed:
10/03, 9/14
9/14:
My head still shakes in disbelief, befuddlement, and shock all rolled into one.
Marlon Brando was a sex symbol in A Streetcar Named Desire and then reaffirmed
it in On the Waterfront. Fast-forward to The Island of Dr. Moreau forty years
later, he's a 500-pound indescribable vat of Larry Drake ugliness. Not only that, but Brando has also truly lost his mind for good.
To call Brando an actor will have to be laughable by now because if you notice his eyes, it's plain and clear he's reading the
lines from cue cards in different locations. So, I can't believe John Frankenheimer let Brando make an absurd deification
of himself. This is the same guy who dealt with Burt Lancaster for a while.
On the other hand, Val Kilmer has begun the unbelievable destruction of his career and most notably his physique to the
point of looking like a fat tub of lard which is kind of like making a full circle to meet Marlon Brando. He did make
The Island of Dr. Moreau interesting in the first twenty minutes, but it's been an interminable fog the rest of the way.
One of the big mistakes is casting David Thewlis and then granting him a lot of screen time, which is way more
than Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando combined, because his character comes off as arrogant and unlikeable and is therefore not worth
caring. As for the plot, makeup effect, and pretty much anything else, they're so unspeakably bad that I'm not going to
bother commenting on them. Instead, I want to point out some things that happened on the set:
Fairuza Balk tried to escape the production but was caught at the airport and was then sent back to the set.
Val Kilmer frustrated director John Frankenheimer so much, that, after shooting Kilmer's last scene
in the movie, Frankenheimer was alleged to have said: "Cut. Now, get that bastard off my set."
David Thewlis vowed to never watch the finished product because it was such a negative experience that he
skipped the premiere of the film. Richard Stanley spent four years developing the project only to be fired after four days.
Marlon Brando wore a small radio receiver to aid him in remembering his lines. Co-star David Thewlis claimed, "He'd be in
the middle of a scene, and suddenly he'd be picking up police messages and Marlon would repeat, 'There's a robbery at
Woolworths.'"
And finally, my favorite of them all: Marlon Brando once told Val Vilmer, "Your problem is you confuse the size of your
paycheck with the size of your talent." Ha! He should've said that to himself.
All in all, The Island of Dr. Moreau is an ungodly mess of epic proportions.