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

Soul Survivors

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau
USA 2014 Directed by David Gregory
Severin Films/Nucleus Films  Blu Ray Zone B

Richard Stanley is one of those directors I’ve always liked... and I finally got to experience him in the flesh last year in a Q&A about his latest movie Colour Out Of Space (reviewed here). I’ve never much been interested in seeing the misstep of a movie adaptation of The Island Of Dr. Moreau that Stanley was fired from and which was reshaped and made into the disasterous production starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer as director John Frankenheimer tried to resurrect a phoenix from the ashes of Stanley’s pre-production but I have, over the years, been fascinated by some of the stories coming off the experience so I’m glad I, almost accidentally, stumbled on this relatively recent documentary about how this happened here.

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island Of Dr. Moreau is, as is to be expected, a lot of talking heads but the various heads that are talking here, including sizeable contributions from Stanley himself, are such that this does make a fascinating documentary. Intercut with quick scenes from Frankenheimer’s disastrous finished project for New Line, it goes back right to the kernel of the project with Stanley explaining all the ideas that came from H. G. Well’s famous novel, why he wanted to do a legitimate version of it in the wake of some historically poor adaptations of the material and all of the bad luck which dogged the project leading to his return, after going AWOL for a long time in the jungle, as a ‘dog-man’ extra in the film, unable to reveal his face to the majority of the cast and crew for fear of being prosecuted and not collecting his rejection fee. He’s in the final cut though.

Graham Humphries also turns up with the original concept art he did to help Stanley secure the green light on the film initially... indeed, he also did the cover art for this documentary release. He’s one of those people who seem to have turned up everywhere in the background of a lot of projects I’ve been watching or reading lately so, yeah, it feels almost like fate drew me to this one.

There are some great anecdotes about the politics and mechanics of a film that goes completely wrong which are, in fact, well... maybe not as opulent as the original director covertly returning to star in the film as a dog-man but, certainly, a lot more enlightening about how some of these kinds of train wrecks happen and, frankly, at this point in his career, I would have thought that anyone wanting to work a film set with Brando was kind of tempting fate a little too heavily anyway. Brando’s dead now, of course, so this tale of stardom gone mad, which is in some ways a rerun on a more absurd scale of the way in which he behaved on Apocalypse Now, can’t really hurt him. I tell you what though... if I were Val Kilmer then I don’t think I’d like to see many of these stories seeing the light of day. I’m amazed he went on to work on anything again after the way he comes across, second hand, in this and it’s really no surprise that he’s not in this documentary in anything other than photos, original footage and remembrances.

As with anything connected with Richard Stanley, there seems to be an almost supernatural hand in the way this production was put together, as he employed a witch to cast ‘fixing spells’ on his first meeting with Brando... who subsequently took to Stanley like a fish to water. The death of a couple of people involved in, somewhat, strangely grim ways, including the witch himself (you’ll have to watch the documentary to find out what happened to him) and the way that all the bad things came together at the same time Stanley was more or less fired from the project, are mentioned here and make you wonder just what kind of bizarre creatures of the nether-world that Stanley has stalking him... in either a positive or negative manner.

The film is also fairly educational to a layman like me. I’ve read stories featuring the Dr. Moreau character over the years but never Wells original novel (although I have read a number of his other works) and I had no idea that Wells had a falling out with Joseph Conrad when Conrad published Heart Of Darknesss a few years later which, allegedly, has a central character based on Moreau in a novel which has the same structure as Wells own. Conrad is said to have based the Kurtz character on Henry Morton Stanley (who famously said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”) who, it turns out, is a direct ancestor of Richard Stanley. As far as the Brando behaviour repeating from Apocalypse Now goes... Apocalypse Now is, of course, Francis Ford Coppolla’s take on Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness... so even there, there is a strange kind of spooky symmetry going on, I think. Although that last bit about Brando is not a connection I remember any of them making in this documentary.

It’s extraordinary though, especially Stanley and Fairuza Balk, who was a good friend of Stanley at the time and who was one of the stars of the movie... both the original as it was to be attempted and then again, much against her will it would seem, the fiasco of a version of it that eventually materialised.

As you would expect from Severin Films, the disc is full of extras including a 48 minute series of outtakes of Stanley, followed by some shorter out-takes sections by other cast and crew members, of fascinating stories which never made it into the final cut. It’s interesting stuff and, as I’ve said before, Stanley’s almost soporific accent combined with a keen intellect and ‘mile a minute’ rapidity of speech were always, even on their own, going to be worth the price of admission here.

Bottom line, Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau is a great little curio about how a perfectly good film can turn into a nightmare for so many people in some unlikely ways. If you love the cinema then you would surely find this an insightful and fascinating project and it has much to be recommended. I’m glad I got the chance to see this one.

The Theatre Bizarre

They Ate Her

The Theatre Bizarre
USA/France/Canada 2011
Directed by Douglas Buck, Buddy Giovinazzo, David Gregory, Karim Hussain, Jeremy Kasten, Tom Savini, Richard Stanley
Blu Ray Zone B (Germany)

Warning: Yeah, you know what? This review is going to have some minor spoilers in it otherwise... well, otherwise I won’t have too much I can talk about.

The Theatre Bizarre is a film I ordered from a different country because I’d heard enough about it that I wanted to see it on a crisp Blu Ray transfer and, in the UK, it only seems to be around on DVD. Well, mission accomplished in terms of the transfer but, alas, it’s really not the film I was hoping it would be. The real trouble with anthology movies is that they tend to be quite hit and miss in the effectiveness of their stories, especially when they are traditionally, just like this one, put together by different directors. I’d have to say of this one that, on the whole, I found it more miss than hit and pretty much weak tea when it came to delivering on the shocks and scares normally associated with a horror movie. Likewise, it’s title leads to expectations of something truly unusual and, while it does have a few moments which I’ll highlight in a little while... again, there wasn’t exactly an abundance of bizarre imagery or story content available.

The film opens quite strongly with some nice credits leading into the first excerpt of a framing story by Jeremy Kasten. A lady doing frantic sketches and artworks of the titular theatre across the street from her window feels the call of the place and goes to the rundown and, seemingly closed, theatre. She gains entry and is greeted by a strange kind of mannequin puppet which, even from the start, is somebody who you can tell is Udo Kier. He’s got a fake head which looks like a rough, claymation impression of him and he mechanically introduces a series of mannequins, as the lady takes her seat and watches... each mannequin leading onto a segment of the film telling their story.

The first story, The Mother Of Toads, is directed by the great director Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) and horror and giallo fans would probably twig right away that the clue as to the style of this segment is in the title. Yeah, that’s right. This whole segment is a little homage to the horror films of Dario Argento and Mario Bava and involves a man’s quest when he is offered a chance to go and view a copy of the infamous Necronomicon at the house of a lady whom his girlfriend buys some earrings from on a market stall. Anyone familiar with the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu mythos will, of course, recognise the Necronomicon as a notorious fictional book within his writings... an evil book which has been referenced by many, many artists, writers, movie makers and musicians over the years.

It has to be said that The Mother Of Toads is easily the best segment of the entire movie and it has some beautiful camerawork such as an amazing shot of the canopy of trees of a forest reflected in a car windscreen from above, following the director’s little homage to the famous ‘road approach’ in Stanley Kubrik’s The Shining. There are also some beautiful, Bava-esque lighting juxtapositions of block colours, perhaps in slightly cooler tones, in certain scenes.

The sequence is not a masterpiece but it’s a great contribution to the film and ends up with a naked toad woman, mucus sex and aggressive toad murders. I kinda wished they’d saved this segment until the end of the picture because at least then it would have gone out with a high. Lucio Fulci enthusiasts might like to know that this segment also features a performance by Catriona MacColl.

Following another part of the framing story, where Udo’s mannequin starts to look less artificial and a little more... um... Udoish, we have the second story, I Love You. This one is filmed with a more clinically neutral palette but with big set pieces of goriness to offset that. It’s really a very disappointing story of a guy and a girl breaking up because she is leaving him and having an affair and... yeah... nothing new here and just a little tedious, I thought. It does, however, have the epic line... “Your penis and my vagina never really liked each other.”... which brought a smile to the face.

Between the second and third segments, Udo’s ‘host’ gets his real eyes.

We then have Wet Dreams, directed by and starring make up and special effects guru Tom Savini, who has been a famous genre fixture both behind and in front of the camera since the mid 1970s. This is the second strongest of the stand alone segments in the movie and involves the story of an abusive man who keeps having bad dreams and drifting from one dream to another. There’s a brilliant dream in this where his naked wife, who he is approaching to have sex, suddenly unleashes these beetle-like pincers from her vagina and bites his cock off. When he ‘wakes up’ to his normal routine, this is also revealed to be a dream as his wife serves him his cock for breakfast. So... it’s an old plot of dreams running like Russian dolls until the final twist. The final twist in these kinds of stories usually involves the person dreaming doing something absolutely terrifying to somebody before discovering that they had actually woken up for real but the end of Savini’s segment has a slightly different kind of reveal. Not necessarily a better one but.... at least it’s different.

The fourth stand alone tale is called The Accident and kind of deals with the loss of innocence of a child as she witnesses death up close for the first time. Alas, there seem to be no horror tropes in this one at all and absolutely no reveal of an ending either. It just kind of drifts along with, I thought, nothing to say.

The fifth story is called Vision Stains and involves a serial killing woman who is going around slowly penetrating people’s eyeballs with her syringe and extracting what she believes to be some kind of spiritual essence from her victims... which she injects right into herself soon after to see what she can learn. Or something like that... the reasons are pretty much the ravings of a deranged mind, to be sure. There are an awful lot of close up shots of people’s eyeballs being penetrated by the syringe in this story. The segment finishes when she kills a pregnant mother, extracts from the fetus inside her and then injects the essence of the baby into her own eyeballs. However, the baby then gets in her head and induces the woman to stab her own eyes out with a screwdriver. She then wanders the earth as a... well... as a blind serial killer, I guess.

The last story in the selection is called Sweets and it’s a very colourful look at a break up of a couple who are very much into eating sweets of all kinds. However, the woman who is leaving her boyfriend has an ulterior motive and... I wish I could say that her intent was fresh and original but, no, the ending of this story has been done to death before, it seemed to me so... yeah, not the strongest story you could have ended on.

And that’s about it. By the end of the film, the twist of the framing segment is revealed but, alas, if you’ve being paying attention to what’s going on in it then I’m afraid it’s not something you wont see coming a mile off. Which is a shame because I really wanted to be surprised by this movie and I even watched it late one night, on my own in the darkness, to add to the atmosphere. Not too much to say about this one though and I would have to say that, while The Theatre Bizarre does demonstrate some artistry and skill in certain places, it’s ultimately not the most interesting film I’ve seen in a while and I genuinely felt the scripting was weak in a lot of places. The directors did their best but the source material does not really seem enough to work with. Okay as a palette cleanser, perhaps, in an all nighter with some more serious or unsettling movies on either side of it... this could be the movie you stick on to have a little break but, as a stand alone experience, it doesn’t get much of a thumbs up from me, I’m afraid.

Jodorowsky's Dune

Dune And Dusted

Jodorowsky's Dune
2013 USA
Directed by Frank Pavich
Screening 12th October 2013 at the London Film Festival

Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of those directors who seems to violently split people when his name comes up in conversation. There are those who think he is quite mad and find his films too challenging to stick with and will let you know about that in no uncertain terms. And there are others who relish the directors own style of creative madness and embrace his films as the great works of art that they should, like all great art, be perceived to be.

Having said all that, I tend to have a more muffled and jaded reaction to his work than most people I talk to on the subject, who seem to be pretty much outspoken either for or against his films... which I think says something in that, at the very least, Jodorowsky’s work has effected them to that extinct (which I personally feel is a good thing). I know that I myself, while having no real shocks or surprises from this director’s works (nor many others in recent years) do, nevertheless, enjoy his movies and speak of them in a positive manner. And, certainly, I remember heading off to the Metro cinema in London (now sadly lost to us) with my friend Kerry back in 1989 to see the movie which was to be my personal introduction to this director’s work, Sante Sangre. I loved that movie a lot, with it’s comfortable and seductive blend of high art and trashy b-movie sensibility... and this has carried through over the years in a more sedate manner as I’ve seen his earlier works such as Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain. In fact, my friend Kerry bought me a box set of this man’s first three movies as a Christmas present a few years ago... for which I am grateful.

Back in about 1979/80, when I would have been about eleven or twelve, I was in one of my favourite comic/book stores (Forbidden Planet) and spied in the “art books” section, two very expensive tomes by the person who would soon become one of my favourite artists... H. R. Giger (Necronomicon and Necronomicon II). I can’t remember if the text was in English on those original editions but I suspect not. When I received these two books for Christmas and birthday, I fell in love with the bleak artwork in the pages and was astonished to see a photograph of the artist, H. R. Giger, sitting around in a desert with my other art hero of the time, Salvador Dali. It was pretty amazing and, from what I could work out from the text (yeah, it must have been in a language foreign to me, I reckon) the two had been collaborating on conceptual designs for a movie version of Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi classic Dune. As it happens, I was wrong about the nature of the collaboration, but I’ll get to that soon.

Now, I’d not read Dune at that time in my life but, as a child growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was almost as impossible a book to escape as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings. It, and it’s sequels (I think there were only three sequels at the time but, as I’m sure you know, there are many more now) were all over British bookshops for many years and, even had they not been, there was usually a copy hanging around the house as my dad was a big fan at the time. When the David Lynch version of the movie got made I was not all that impressed with it, to be honest (neither was Jodorowsky, in one of the funniest and most memorable scenes in this film). Perhaps if I revisited it nowadays I might be more receptive to it but, to me, David Lynch was the spirit of Eraserhead... not the version of Dune that ended up on the big screen and underwhelmed audiences at the time.

Frank Pavich’s new documentary film, Jodorowsky's Dune, tells the story (of which there have been many rumours in the past) of the time when Jodorosky wanted to make an epic version of the movie... and how it all fell into place and then, after a long time in pre-production, got thrown away in favour of a version which was simpler to understand by the suits in control of Hollywood. And as you may expect from anything associated with Jodorowsky... it’s a mad tale.

H. R. Giger was, indeed, invited to do some of the conceptual art for one of the planets, which he did and which was pictured in those Necronomicon books I was given as a teen. Another major designer on the film was Chris Foss, the illustrator who many will remember had a gift for paintings of highly detailed starships which graced the covers of almost every science-fiction book going in the seventies and eighties. If you see a Chris Foss starship design, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. His work is so distinctive. What the documentary doesn’t mention, and I’ve no idea why, is the other thing that Fosse is equally well known but actually less famous for. The black and white illustrations in the original best selling editions of The Joy Of Sex.

The tale of the movie gets more and more brilliant and less and less likely as Jodorowsky talks extensively for the documentary. He recruits Dan O’ Bannon’s services for the film (after saying no to one of Hollywood’s leading special effects men, Douglas Trumbull) and then secures the services of, among others, Salvador Dali to play the Emperor, Orson Welles to play the Baron Harkonnen, Mick Jagger as somebody who I completely forget and Pink Floyd to do the music for one of the planets. They are Jodorowsky’s “Dune warriors”. He even gets his son trained in various combat styles to ready him for the part of Paul.  And as crazy a mix as that all sounds, Jodorowsky’s stories of how, for the most part, these people just turned up in unlikely places when he had no idea how to find them and then said yes, is even crazier. And the way he courted both Dali and Welles is absolutely amazing and something I don’t think I’d heard before.

The documentary culminates in the famous, rare book which was put together to sell the project (honestly, I can’t describe this here, you just have to see this movie) and  finishes by showng the influences on cinema resulting from the pilfering and reusing of the concepts created by Jodorowsky’s extended “Dune family”. Some of which are easy to see and others... which are not great examples, I would have to say.

Pavich’s film is absolutely fascinating and rivetting, using mostly talking head footage by Jodorowsky, Foss, Giger and others close to the production, but also from the underused director Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) and Jodorowsky’s good friend, the director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives). There’s also some animated sequences where the director brings some of the storyboards and designs for the film to life and, as I was very relieved to discover in the Q & A session with the director after the screening, the people in question had been very careful to just breathe a little life into the original drawing and paintings for the animations, rather than add their own baggage into the mix.

The whole thing sails along at a pace which is a reflection of Jodorowsky’s own unique personality and enthusiasm for the project and it also has a kick ass score by Kurt Stenzel, which is quite “in your face” but catchy and appropriately mixed into the film. It’s a bit reminiscent of the small scale chamber works of Philip Glass but it is quite distinctive and hypnotic and although it strikes you right away as you’re watching, the music doesn’t distract from the people who are talking on screen and is very mindful of the job it needs to be doing.

So there you have it.

Jodorowsky's Dune is a great documentary made by a director who knows when to step back from the material when needed and who knows well enough when to add a bit more to it to make it interesting without intruding on the hearts, minds and words of the people being interviewed on screen. It also brings us the full tale of one of the classic unmade films in movie legend, which is something we should all be grateful for. So, if you want to know about all this stuff then you should definitely try to see this movie. It’s worth the price of admission just for the late Dan O’ Bannon’s description of his first, drug tinged meeting with Jodorowsky. Don’t miss out on this one.