The Island of Dr. Moreau

The Island of Dr. Moreauⁱ is altogether passible. It obviously suffers from a very poor understanding of science in the original workⁱⁱ, but if you can look past that, and past the pedestrian attempts of the modernizers to modernizeⁱⁱⁱ (a task made very easy by the surreal nonsense of the aggregate) then what remains is a very dorky fellow ineptly chasing an entirely credible piece of tail (though inexplicably the snout-nosed Balk was made a "cat" rather than the obvious pig she is) while Val Kilmer does a very credible rendition of Hannah Arendt's banal evil and Marlon Brando acts a mindblowing antipope. That scene is iconic, and it is not just iconic for how well it works for the film - I am convinced the best cinematic product of Blizzard's creative run was Baal's appearance at the Arreat summit. They totally lifted it.

Other than that scene there really isn't very much left, just a lot of "action" bullcrap (who the fuck keeps drums of gasoline stored like that ?!) and a whole lot of unflattering parallels to all sorts of Obamas, Bushes, Mugabes and other subhuman monkeys with delusions of temporal relevancy. But I guess there's worse uses of one's time than watching the monkeys' adventures on film - such as for instance living in the monkeys' domains and watching their adventures out the window.

To each his own, as the old human saying goes.

1. 1996, by John Frankenheimer, with Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer and that ax-crazy slut from American History X (Fairuza Balk). [↩]
2. No, really, you can't make "a man pig" through "genes", for one thing because genes aren't these simple embers of identity working on a fundamentally alchemical, humoral theory of existence ; and for the other thing because the power and reach of their interplay creates a wealth of meaning not directly comprehensible to peculiar fenotypes, which is to say that a man-pig would very much not be "a bipedal animal with some outward features that are reminiscent (in a human intuitive definition of reminiscence) of whatever features of an actual pig that are most salient to a human observer". [↩]
3. Such as adding 1980s "animal rights" footage for no comprehensible purpose - the mechanical cleanliness of the cages for instance would not become fashionable on Moreau's own island for another half decade ; they used very elaborate forged iron at the time, and he would have. Nor was it called "DNA" then, and this label is inappropriate in the context it is used, by the way. [↩]