Island of Lost Souls **** (1932, Charles Laughton, Bela Lugosi, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams) – Classic Movie Review 907

Director Erle C Kenton’s 1932 horror movie is still the best film version of H G Wells’s story The Island of Dr Moreau. It was considered so horrific that it was banned by the British censor right up until 1958.

Charles Laughton eagerly devours his meaty star role as the crazed vivisectionist Dr Moreau who is turning animals into monstrous humans and human visitors into humanimals in his mad vivisection experiments on his tiny Pacific tropical island. Richard Arlen co-stars as Edward Parker who is rescued at sea after his ship goes down. Parker gets into a fight with Captain Davies (Stanley Fields), who tosses him overboard while making a delivery to Dr Moreau’s island.

Dr Moreau’s Beast-foreman Sayer of the Law (Bela Lugosi) helps him in his devious plot to mate Arlen’s Parker with one of his most successful experiments, his beautiful Panther Woman Lota (Kathleen Burke). Meanwhile, Parker’s fiancée Ruth (Leila Hyams) sets out to try to find and rescue him with the help of the intrepid Captain Donohue (Paul Hurst).

Despite the movie’s great, venerable age and Laughton’s over-lusty, over-the-top performance, this is still an impressive, thoughtful, eerie and sometimes even quite scary old horror film with a satisfyingly menacing tone, lots of ideas to ponder, succulent performances and many powerful sequences.

Based on H G Wells’s story The Island of Dr Moreau (and remade under that title in 1977 and 1996), it was also remade as Terror Is a Man (1959), where a warning bell sounded in cinemas before ‘horrific’ scenes. High up among The Island of Lost Souls’s virtues must be counted Karl Struss’s creepily atmospheric cinematography and Hans Dreier’s stylish art direction. Among the Beast victims are three future movie stars, Randolph Scott, Larry Buster Crabbe and a 19-year-old Alan Ladd.

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