I’m telling you guys this a few days early, so you can fit it into your busy little lives: This Friday, director Richard Stanley will be in Portland for a screening of Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Dr. Moreau. If you remember 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (or if your only exposure to said film has come via the beliefs of one Dr. Alphonse Mephesto), seeing a documentary about the making of that movie might sound like an awful idea. IT IS NOT. Dr. Moreau was one of Hollywood’s most fucked-up productions, and Lost Soul does an amazing job documenting it. My review, from this week’s Mercury:
“Knowing the odds were stacked against me, I resorted to witchcraft,” deadpans Richard Stanley. The director of low-budget pulp like Hardware and Dust Devil, Stanley’s next film was to be a big-budget adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau—but the project was so disastrous that Stanley did, indeed, resort to witchcraft. And that was before Marlon Brando started wearing an ice bucket on his head, before Val Kilmer turned out to be an “asshole” and a “prep school bully,” before Nelson de la Rosa (28 inches tall and “very sexual”) became Brando’s ever-present BFF, before extras in animal prosthetics had a months-long drunken furry convention, and before Stanley was fired, left to wander the Australian rain forest as John Frankenheimer attempted to salvage the film. (He failed.) Like Lost in La Mancha and Jodorowsky’s Dune, the weird, surprising Lost Soul is a story of ambition gone awry—and a must-see for anyone who loves movies. Stanley will be in attendance on Fri March 6, when Lost Soul will play as a double feature with The Otherworld, his documentary about “the history of magical belief in the remote region of France where he has made his home for the past several years.”
Seriously, it’s great, and definitely worth seeing, especially with Stanley in attendance. (And The Otherworld looks pretty fun, too.) So there you go. Heads up. Friday.
I haven’t seen it in like 20 years, but I remember liking that movie when I was a teenager.
Sounds interesting. Thanks.