Exceedingly grisly for its day, and still pretty frightening, the movie is an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The Island Of Dr. Moreau, about a mad scientist who experiments with evolution in his island laboratory, leading to shocking results, half-human half-beast creatures for whose predicament the term identity crisis would be a gigantic understatement. Their lives are hell, as Laughton's sadistic treatment of them makes their existence sheer pain.
Filmed like a horror movie, which is how it's often classified, the film is more like a precursor of the nature-gone-wild science fiction pictures of the fifties, minus the usual military heroics. It also, thanks to Wells, has the courage of its convictions, and the pessimistic implications of its ideas are not glossed over or simplified in the least. Science, in other words, is not used as an excuse for showing us horror but is rather,--and there's no beating around the bush here--the cause of it.
It is a very dark and gloomy film, and it is impossible for any intelligent person not to ponder the year of its release, 1933, as the reason for this as much as the story itself. This was the year Hitler came to power in Germany; also, Franklin Roosevelt in the U.S. We knew what Hitler was about, or at least his ideas, while FDR was still an unknown quantity. The Depression was at its worst, and millions were unemployed and starving. Without going too far out on a limb it is easy enough to see the lost, tortured souls in the film as victims of the Depression. They are men twisted out of shape by those in power,--like the wicked, white-suited Dr. Moreau--and their future looks grim, their prospects few. "Is this what the world is coming to?", the movie seems to ask. In 1933 it was hard to come up with a glibly optimistic reply. As one of the leaders of the beastly mob asks at one point, "Are We Not Men?". This was a question that at the time had no easy answer. That it had to be raised in the first place is as frightening to contemplate as anything we have actually seen.
Filmed like a horror movie, which is how it's often classified, the film is more like a precursor of the nature-gone-wild science fiction pictures of the fifties, minus the usual military heroics. It also, thanks to Wells, has the courage of its convictions, and the pessimistic implications of its ideas are not glossed over or simplified in the least. Science, in other words, is not used as an excuse for showing us horror but is rather,--and there's no beating around the bush here--the cause of it.
It is a very dark and gloomy film, and it is impossible for any intelligent person not to ponder the year of its release, 1933, as the reason for this as much as the story itself. This was the year Hitler came to power in Germany; also, Franklin Roosevelt in the U.S. We knew what Hitler was about, or at least his ideas, while FDR was still an unknown quantity. The Depression was at its worst, and millions were unemployed and starving. Without going too far out on a limb it is easy enough to see the lost, tortured souls in the film as victims of the Depression. They are men twisted out of shape by those in power,--like the wicked, white-suited Dr. Moreau--and their future looks grim, their prospects few. "Is this what the world is coming to?", the movie seems to ask. In 1933 it was hard to come up with a glibly optimistic reply. As one of the leaders of the beastly mob asks at one point, "Are We Not Men?". This was a question that at the time had no easy answer. That it had to be raised in the first place is as frightening to contemplate as anything we have actually seen.