Hollywood history is littered with disastrous productions that suffer from turmoil at every turn, but few have experienced a more sustained barrage of bad luck than the infamous remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau, the 1996 version that marked the third live-action adaptation of H.G. Wells’ iconic sci-fi story.
Very rarely do tortured movies yield stellar results, and this one was no different. A box office disaster that couldn’t even make it to $50 million – losing a fortune due to the $40 million budget plus additional marketing and distribution expenses – The Island of Dr. Moreau was additionally savaged by critics on its way to finding unwanted recognition from the Razzies.
The practical effects and makeup are impressive, but you know things have gone seriously wrong when that’s the only positive to be drawn. Director Richard Stanley’s tenure lasted just three days into shooting, with the filmmaker being fired by fax, partly because of his failure to control wayward and utterly disinterested star Val Kilmer.
Meanwhile, Marlon Brando refused to learn his lines and would often deviate from the script to nonsensical results, with the atmosphere not helped by the fact he and Kilmer openly and utterly detested each other. Having reacted badly to his firing, Stanley suffered a breakdown, before being sneaked back onto the set he’d previously been booted from in full costume as an extra, giving him a secret role in the film. It was nuts, but not in a good way, with the film’s reputation enduring as an exercise in how not to handle an unwieldy production.
Sure enough, a Reddit thread remarking on The Island of Dr. Moreau over a quarter of a century on features precisely zero discussion on the merits of the movie itself, but instead focuses on the unbridled madness that went on when the cameras weren’t rolling. We don’t recommend you check out, but we will point you in the direction of making-of doc Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau.
Published: Jan 4, 2023 04:18 am