THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1996)

You can pretty accurately judge the film from this picture

This movie ended up being pretty famous even though nobody saw it, because it inspired the early South Park characters of Dr. Mephisto and his little-man Kevin, but more importantly, it inspired Mini-Me in the 2nd Austin Powers film and now we know who Verne Troyer is instead of not knowing.  Its definitely one of those movies that's bad in a good way: occasionally over ambitious, chock full of memorably wacky performances, and it shows you something you've seen a million times before in a seriously freaky way you've never seen it before.  What else could we expect from a movie about Marlon Brando's private island of man-beast-mutants and muddle religious symbolism?  Nevertheless, the total madness of display is consistently entertaining and all the prosthetics and makeup work from SFX legend Stan Winston is impressively gruesome and hair-raising.

David Thewlis is the lead and audience surrogate, a UN everyman who survives a plan crash in the remote south seas only to be rescued by Val Kilmer and abducted to the titular locale.  Thewlis like all British actors was required by law to appear in the Harry Potter films, but he was best known just before this as the villain in Dragonheart and just after this for his bizarre single scene as video artist Knox Harrington in The Big Lebowski.  Thewlis, who would later greatly regret this project and vow to never view the finished product, lucked into the leading role because Val Kilmer was inspired by Marlon Brando to pull some master class level Prima Donna behavior on the producers, showing up days late to the set and demanding extensive re-writes to vastly reduce his workload.

So why not just switch him into a smaller role?  Boom!  Done, Val Kilmer is now the mad doctor's right hand man, a pot-smoking amoral neurosurgeon who seems to share Kilmer's predilection for not giving a shit.  There's only one scene where it seems like Kilmer is concerned about his job, the safety of the island, and the grand plan of the doctor's research.  The rest of the time, he's just getting high and busting balls.  He even finds time to dress up as Brando and deliver an uncannily accurate impression of him.  It's so good that for a moment it looks like Thewlis's character thinks he is hearing Brando from his memory, but then he discovers Kilmer hiding in a corner, giggling like some sort of cross between Marlon Brando and a school girl.

Marlon fucking Brando.  He owns this movie.  He postures as the Pope for some reason, clad all in white and carried about by his manimal assistants, issuing pseudo-religious proclamations in an almost unintelligibly effete British accent whenever he's not having his bucket helmet re-iced (no really).  As soon as he meets Thewlis, he gives him a gun to calm him down; now that's a first for a movie bad guy.  His experiments are supposedly to create a perfect human being, but it sure looks like he just Frankensteined a bunch of animals into people and then put pants on them.  He forbids the animals from killing any other living thing, but then Val Kilmer keeps the island plenty well stocked with fat juicy adorable rabbits, so it seems cruel/inevitable that the animals will resist their minimal human conditioning and just start eating those damn rabbits.  Scientific Proposal:  I bet this cheetah-man won't eat rabbits if I give him a shirt and pants.  Result:  Animal Uprising.

Some of the animals seem pretty human.  The mad doctor's alluring, mysterious daughter played by Fairuza Balk looks like a normal Hollywood actress for most of the film until the inner feline gets the better of her after Val Kilmer destroys all the serum that kept the animals from regressing because... I dunno, he seemed bored or stoned or something.  Ron Perlman, no stranger to extensive makeup, plays a blind goat-man called the Sayer of the Law who stands around saying the Law all the time but the animals don't really like the cut of his jib.  He preaches about wearing pants, pooping in designated places only, monogamy, two-legged walking, and a bunch of other jive-ass shit that the animals aren't crazy about.

Once they figure out how to remove their surgically implanted shock collars thanks to Hyena-Swine, the animals corner Brando in a scene reminiscent of the replicants confronting Tyrell in Bladerunner.  The mad doctors fumbles a question about their creation, instead explains the difference between composers Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin.  Now whenever Brando appeared in a film, he liked to do as little work as possible and many times that meant greatly reduced screen time.  So in this film, you know he's going to show up as late as he can in the story and that he's going to depart as early as he can and hopefully as spectacularly as he can, so its not much of a spoiler to say that the man-monsters he created voice their disagreement with him by eating him in a hammock.

Allegedly Kilmer tried the same trick on original director Richard Stanley when he balked at Kilmer's 'I don't wanna do shit' plan, and legendary director John Frankenheimer, looking for the box office hit he would get soon after with Ronin and willing to jump in on projects as a moment's notice, came aboard but decided instead of the finely-tuned script that had been tweaked for years, the movie would do better if they re-wrote extensively, so much so that Brando's famous habit of hiding cue cards around the set so he wouldn't have to learn his lines was thwarted, and instead he had to be fed his lines through a small earpiece, which accidentally picked up police signals, leading Brando to ad-lib lines like 'robbery in progress at Woolworths.'

The animals turn out to be marginally worse than Brando at running the island, because of their liberal use of stolen AK-47's and their controversial 'blow-everything-up' policies.  Kilmer doesn't seem interested in running the island, instead handing out powerful drug-cocktails to the various ungodly abominations on the island, and presiding over an abbreviated orgy as some kind of hedonistic philosopher king, musing 'I wanna go to dog heaven' even as vengeful beasts close in around him.  But he can't quite compare to Brando, who takes demented glee in unhinged scenes like the one where he introduces his 'family' members to Thewlis.  Each son is hairier and greasier than the previous animal-human hybrid, but they all stand up to introduce themselves and shake hands, as Brando rattles off their ludicrous names: Waggdi, Azazello, M'ling, Majai.

Where did they get those awesomely crazy names?  The rebel leader is just called Hyena-Swine.  Wait why did they cross those two animals?  It's never really clear where the research started and where it's headed; it looks like somebody wanted an island theme park full of monsters so they did that.  It looks like one of the manimals named Assassimon tried to teach himself baseball, but its not clear what beyond vegetarianism is expected by Brando of the experimental creatures.  I don't think they evolved humor yet though, because when Val Kilmer says 'you bore me' to a boar-man, nobody even laughs!  This movie might be a colossal clusterfuck, but it sure it fun to watch.