
Set in the year 2010, Dr. Moreau has successfully combined human and animal DNA to make a crossbreed animal. Well, as usual, something goes wrong and David Thewlis must try to stop it before it is too late. Originally rated R, but cut by Frankenheimer to allow "a wider audience".... (Full plot summary below)
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Set in the year 2010, Dr. Moreau has successfully combined human and animal DNA to make a crossbreed animal. Well, as usual, something goes wrong and David Thewlis must try to stop it before it is too late. Originally rated R, but cut by Frankenheimer to allow "a wider audience".
Leave your thoughts about The Island of Dr. Moreau.
| The Seattle TimesJohn HartlBrando's performance is enormous fun, but it's not just a joke. He's hilarious and gently mesmerizing at once, and director John Frankenheimer savvily adjusts the tone of his movie to fit Brando's daft brilliance...Let's face it -- this is one nutty movie. It's not exactly "good," but I sure had a good time. |
| Your Movies (cleveland.com)Gerry ShamrayAmazingly, Kilmer delivers an odder performance than Brando. Creepy retelling. |
| NewsweekDavid AnsenBrando's performance is enormous fun, but it's not just a joke. He's hilarious and gently mesmerizing at once, and director John Frankenheimer savvily adjusts the tone of his movie to fit Brando's daft brilliance. |
| Entertainment WeeklyKen TuckerHe’s become such an obvious parody of himself that Frankenheimer has permitted Kilmer to do a wicked mid-movie impersonation of Brando’s character; it’s funny, but it also gives The Island of Dr. Moreau an extra layer of camp it certainly didn’t need. |
| Austin ChronicleSteve DavisFrankenheimer resorts to gunfire and explosions to bring the film to its predictable end. It's when things get mundane that you find yourself wishing that Brando would reappear on the screen to make things interesting again. |
| USA TodayMike ClarkI was never bored, even if the film ultimately amounts to little more than a very expensive freak show. Just before slurring one of the all-time great terrible last lines ("I want to go to dog heaven"), Kilmer utters, with sublime understatement, a line that doubles as the film's epitaph: "Well, that didn't work out." Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco. |
| The Associated PressBob ThomasWhat we deserved was "The Island of Jeanne Moreau." That I'd pay to see. |
| ReelViewsJames BerardinelliInsultingly, Frankenheimer concludes the movie with a short sermon about the fine line that separates man from beast. If the director actually wanted to get this point across, he should have worked it into the film rather than tacking it on as an afterthought. It is, after all, an integral aspect of the source material. That it has been so thoroughly excised from the main plot isn't The Island of Dr. Moreau's only problem, but it's symptomatic of the flawed mindset that went into planning this occasionally incoherent and ultimately disappointing motion picture. |
| San Francisco ExaminerBarbara ShulgasserSympathizing with Moreau would be difficult in any case. But with Brando in the role, there is the added obstacle of needing to suppress laughter every time he opens his pursed mouth. |
| Chicago Sun-TimesAvis L. WeathersbeeJohn Frankenheimer is credited as director, but given the scrambled, multiple agendas at play here, he seems to function more like a bemused traffic cop. |