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Eric's Bad Movies: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

03.06.10

, Though. Based on an H.G. Wells original that had already been made into a movie twice, the film was probably doomed the minute the leading roles were assigned to Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer . Both actors were notoriously hard to work with. (Kilmer has since mellowed out; Brando, however, has only become more intractable since his death.) One or the other could probably have been managed by a importantly experienced director, or a child psychologist, or a dog whisperer. But both of them? In the same film? That's too much. A movie set can only handle one mildly ludicrous, Method-acting diva at a time.

The film's behind-the-scenes problems are legendary. The chairman, Richard Stanley, was fired after three days of shooting and replaced with John Frankenheimer , who'd been making movies for 40 years yet somehow had never made one with distorted animal-human hybrids or Marlon Brando. (But I repeat myself.) The screenplay was almost entirely rewritten while the glaze was being shot, as Frankenheimer felt Stanley's original vision wasn't baffling or loose enough. Kilmer and Frankenheimer bickered constantly, and Brando got bored and irritable. To make matters worse, the work was struck with fairuza balk, a tropical disease that affects -- No. I'm being told " Fairuza Balk " is a person, and that she played one of the characters in this silent picture. That seems unlikely, but whatever.

Source: Film.com