The Isle of Lost Souls

The Isle of Lost Souls, a Paramount horror film from 1932, is not a good movie.  In fact, this adaptation of H. G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau is so terrible that it is uniquely memorable.  The picture isn't just bad -- it's Ed Wood bad and, therefore, in a weird way, almost good:  what the picture lacks in intelligence, it makes up for with crazy conviction.  Certain elements of the film, for instance, the characterization of the mad scientist's operating theater as the "house of pain" and the mongrel monsters chantng "Are we not men?" in response to Bela Lugosi's recitation of "the law" have entered into popular culture.  (The avant-garde rock band Devo used to chant "Are we not men?" at its concerts.)   It's hard to describe the esthetic category into which most of this film fits -- it's certainly some kind of kitsch but memorable and, even, perhaps, profound because of the film-makers ferocious commitment to this miserable material. 

The tone of absurd non sequitur is established early.  When the rock-jawed hero, Richard Arlen, is fished out of the misty sea, the camera turns to track along a group of sailors watching the rescue.  The sailors have memorably craggy and weathered faces and look very sinister, but there is no reason for the shot and it is both showy and singularly pointless -- none of these interesting faces ever appears again in the film.  In a later scene, a wicked sea captain is threatened with losing his sea-farer's license (is there such a thing?)  The episode exists to make a very limited plot point -- the heroine learns the latitude and longitude where her fiancée was shipwrecked on Dr. Moreau's island and, therefore, can travel to rescue him.  But the sequence bogs down in moronic repartee between a sort of Administrative Law Judge and the evil sea captain: three times, the judge adds to his admonition that the piratical sea captain straighten up and fly right -- each time, the pirate who is about to leave the chamber, pauses, removes his hand from the door to look over this shoulder to receive the Judge's tongue-lashing.  It's all obsessively detailed and utterly meaningless -- the Judge and sea-captain will have nothing more to do with the plot after this peculiar paralytic bit of business.  This is the kind of film where the sound recorded on sound-stage has a hollow echo, a distinct tone of confinement -- and, yet, the characters are supposed to be walking through a jungle near the seaside. 

The plot involves a mad scientist, Dr. Moreau (played by Charles Laughton) who is converting animals to human beings.  Unfortunately, this process, which involves lots of vivisection in the "House of Pain" has failed to remove "all the beast-flesh" resulting in mongrel hybrids -- the half-man half-animal mutants have hairy cheeks and often revert to their animal habits, gibbering like chimpanzees or barking like dogs.  The most wonderful specimen in Moreau's museum of animal to human metamorphoses is "The Leopard Woman" -- so-named in the film's titles.  (This film is a rare case where a title actually serves a narrative purpose -- the title tells us that the heroine on the island, a girl with frizzy hair and enormous almond-shaped eyes is, in fact, a converted feline and, therefore, perhaps, not to be wholly trusted -- the film is very short, a mere 67 minutes, and, therefore, efficiently constructed:  the titles actually carry the narration here, more or less implying to the viewer the eerie-looking girl's back-story.)  Moreau and his assistant, a surgeon exiled from England because of an "illegal operation", regard the girl as their masterpiece and they want to see if they can breed her with the burly Richard Arlen -- "does she have a real woman's passions?" Moreau salaciously asks.  In fact, the Leopard Woman is fetching and attractive to the kidnaped hero who passionately kisses her, momentarily forgetting his blonde fiancée who is hurrying across the south Pacific and into harm's way to rescue him.  Their romance collapses, however, when the Leopard Woman claws the hero's back with her talons -- "it's the damnable beast flesh that always returns" Moreau says.  Fortunately, the hero's pale, blonde, and rather indifferent, fiancée appears, rescues her betrothed from the clutches of the Leopard Woman, and foments a rebellion among the beast-men.  The monsters vivisect Moreau, after first staggering in a menacing way toward the camera in a montage devised to best show the furry make-up and deformed noses and jaws of the beast-men.  As the House of Pain flares vividly in the background, the hero with his fiancée and a mariner set sail -- "Don't look back!" the mariner gruffly advises.  

Some of the beast-men are clearly evolved specimens of orangatangs, gorillas, and chimpanzees. At least one of them is a faithful dog vivisected into a furry little hunchback.  Some of them are evolved moles and rodents; Lugosi's hirsute "speaker of the law" looks like a kind of bear.  One problem with the film is that the supposedly human characters look exceedingly odd as well.  Richard Arlen has aggressively masculine features; he's all chiseled jaw and mouth except that his eyes are soft, seductive, and strangely effeminate -- adding to the peculiar effect is the fact that his ears are pointed.  Charles Laughton's appearance is scarier than any of the half-human brutes in the film:  he has a perfectly moon-shaped face, presumably the result of massive injections of cortico-steroids, and this lunar countenance goes with a generally spherical physiognomy -- he's round in every respect.  But the strangest thing about his appearance is his beard --it's as if someone painted a whale's flukes on his chin or as if he grew a beard the exact shape of the lower-half of the Starbuck's mermaid beneath his lips.  "Do you know what it feels like to be a god!" he declaims to someone.  The picture is a bizarre mess, but, certainly, it was someone's labor of love -- everything is too obsessively designed to be accidental.  The movie's themes, which are dank and possibly racist, are too pre-Code for the film to have been re-made until quite recently -- later versions were produced in the last twenty or so years,  Moreau sends gorilla-men to rape the hero's fiancé -- in this picture, the sordid stuff is not incidental; rather, it's integral to the proceedings.