THE ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932)
Written by Waldemar Young and Philip Wylie

Directed by Erle C. Kenton

Edward Parker (Richard Arlen), the soul survivor of a shipwreck, is rescued by a freighter carrying cargo to an island not on any map. Thrown overboard by the drunken captain, Parker finds himself the guest of Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton), who has been conducting experiments on animals. Genuinely disturbing on so many levels, let’s start with Charles Laughton’s brilliant, subtle performance as Dr. Moreau, a scientific sadist who performs his operations on his living animal subjects without anesthesia, in complete disregard of their pain. In fact, his research subjects have dubbed his laboratory The House of Pain, a title that Moreau glories in. The scenes in which he wields a bull whip, instructing his subjects in The Law (“What is the Law?” “Not to spill blood. Are we not men?”), are emblematic of the true nature of his character, who knows what it feels like to be God. Laughton’s performance is never showy, never hammy, as it could easily have been; he is obviously invested in his character and makes emotional changes with mercurial speed. His performance is rich, deep, and thoroughly creepy. Also worthy of acknowledgement is the uncredited makeup work of Charles Gemora (who appears briefly in his more familiar guise as a gorilla), who created a seemingly endless army of misshapen half-humans, all nightmarishly realistic. Nightmarish, in fact, perfectly describes the film’s general atmosphere, as it depicts the agony inflicted on Moreau’s victims unflinchingly; the pain they feel is palpable and disturbingly real, never the “indications of pain” that pass as tokens of the real thing in most genre films fearful of distracting from their entertainment value. H.G. Wells wrote “The Island of Dr. Moreau” as an anti-vivisection tract. (Let’s just pause a moment to consider the real-life horror of that word: vivi, meaning alive; section, meaning to cut up.) But he was so repulsed by this film that he was happy when the British Board of Film Censors banned it, a testament to how real it feels. Erle C. Kenton moves the fine script by Young and Wylie along rapidly, and the sequence toward the film’s end in which the humanimals lurch into fire-lit close-up is a stand out. Special mention must be made of Kathleen Burke, who makes Lota the Panther Woman awkwardly believable and sympathetic, of Arthur Hohl as Moreau’s self-loathing assistant, and Bela Lugosi, Hans Steinke, Buster Brodie, and Tetsu Komai as particularly effective beast men. This pre-code horror movie has been in serious need of restoration for decades, and Criterion has performed admirably with this typically fine DVD release. Though rough in spots and occasionally dark, THE ISLAND OF LOST SOULS isn’t likely to ever look or sound better than this. Criterion has also created a menu that is a small work of graphic art in and of itself, so good I watched it several times before starting the feature. If you’re a fan of classic horror, this is the Must Have disc of the year.

— Robert Deveau, The Doomed Farmer