j* Movie Reviews 2019

Lost Soul (2014) - making of doco

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

This is one *sequel* where you really, really, one hundred percent need to watch "the first one" before you see this. It's not a sequel, but a documentary about what went wrong. And yet, if there has ever been a film that needed a second one to take me further with the situation of the first, this is it. So you need to see the actual film first. Island of Dr Moreau (1996) is an amazing standout piece of film. I saw it for the first time last year, and strangely didn't write a review. To set the scene:

The sci-fi movie The Island of Dr Moreau is amazingly, phenomenally bad. It's a multi-million dollar film, with real production companies involved, with really decent stars like Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando and Fairuza Balk, it has some crazy-good beast costumes, excellent source material, and plenty of high production values.

But it is so crappy. Watching it is like watching some weird alt-Eurovision phenomena. I remember sitting there going "wtf" and "why are they doing this now?" It just doesn't make any sense and it is crazy weird.

As soon as it ended we rushed to google to find out "what the hell went wrong with Dr Moreau." And to be fair, I have trinkets of this stored in my teen-mind... I do remember the fact that Hollywood had come to Cairns was a big deal, and a lot of the drama was reported in the QLD papers/news as it unfolded. But once you see the reality of the film produced in the chaos it gives it a whole other dimension.

*****
So this doco, LOST SOUL explores all the drama and madness that descended upon the set, through interviews with those involved. It starts a bit slowly with first director Richard Stanley talking a bit too long about his grandiose plans for the film, and his vision, rada-rada. And who knows, maybe if he'd held it together the film would have been amazing. But then we start to hear from those who were there as the production at first unravelled and then crashed and burned. What is especially hilarious is the contrast between the highfalutin Hollywood voices contrasted with the knock-about Australians who worked as extras and cast and crew.

There are just so many angles to the way this went wrong. It feels like a film more cursed than any Egyptian tomb. And you know, I can't help but feel Richard Stanley is a little at fault with that for having a Warlock friend carry out a sort of blood sacrifice right at the start to get Marlon Brando on board... perhaps some occult forces of the universe should never be tweaked? I mean that seems like a weird one-off sort of thing, but later, Stanley talks knowing the film was getting a bit wayward and how he wanted another instalment of warlock-power.... But his warlock-fixer had by then developed bone-cancer as a result of shoddy OH&S in his workplace in the UK.

Seriously. Mummy-curses have nothing on the delightful weirdness of this.

The huge swirling vortex of bad energy this film ingests is amazing. Implicated in the production are:

-Bruce Willis and Demi Moore's divorce.

-Val Kilmer's divorce.

-Marlon Brando's daughter's suicide.

Production weirding on set include:

-A shoot meant to take 40 days ended up rolling for somewhere in the vicinity of six months.

Ripping out swathes of jungle and planting their own banana plantation (can that even be legitimately true?)

-Marlon Brando demanding to wear an ice bucket on his head because it was so hot... this was a star demand that was written into the film. Marlon apparently thought the whole film was stupid, and as such didn't care what went down so long as he got paid.

-Being hit by a cyclone. Endless rain. As one crew-member points out, if you look at a rainfall map, Cairns is right there in the super rainfall bubble.

-After being sacked, director Stanley didn't catch his plane home, he ran away to live in a jungle hippy commune. When the Aussie crew-members who were meant to get him on the plane heard these rumours, they went and found him. And all decided it would be a hilarious lark to have him back on set under one of the elaborate beast masks.

-Extras/beast people were routinely put through three hour make-up sessions to sit around all day not being filmed. As Aussie pig-lady explains, no-one cared because they were all getting paid by day... although they did all get a bit troppo and might have made a lot of weird short-films whilst in their beast makeup. They didn't exactly say it was porn, but you get the feeling some of it was porn.

-Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando often got locked in fierce trailer sit-ins, with neither leaving their trailer to start filming until the other one came out. And then neither came out. So there was no filming.

-The script was whackily rewritten on-set at the whims of nearly anyone, at anytime.

It just keeps rolling. By far my favourite part of this story is the bit about Fairuza Balk fleeing to Sydney. As explained helpfully by American's who themselves clearly have no clue of Australian geography. She famously got so fed up with the chaos and madness on set in Cairns that she decided she'd pop out to Sydney. And thus a crew-member drove her there in a hired limo. And they talk to the crew-member who did it, and he just acts like there was so much weird shit going down at the time that it didn't even seem strange. Unlike several other key cast members, Fairuza did come back

Anyway, the original film and this doco should be compulsory viewing for anyone who has ever contemplated making a film, or anyone interested in films. Because it shows that no matter how big a production is, it can still descend into absolute chaos. It's equal parts cautionary tale and reality-retrospective.

It told me all the stories I wanted to hear, and some I hadn't found in google.

J* gives it 5 stars... all for the content.