The Island of Dr. Moreau has been adapted into a feature three times, and it’s this first version that gets closest to the the story’s shocking perversity. The other two get lost in the elaborate makeup designs for the animal/human hybrids, while this retains the vile ideas of a mad scientist transforming animals against their will, and still being treated like lesser beings. Suffering at Moreau’s sadistic hands inside the dreaded House of Pain, while he eyes his next phase of mating a human with a Panther Woman in the hope she’ll bear a child. I don’t think a modern Horror audience would even want to see a story like this; it needs the layers of 1930s censorship just to be watchable. The frosting on this cake is Charles Laughton playing God as Dr. Moreau, Bela Lugosi as the Animal Leader who quotes Moreau’s Laws while asking “Are we not men?” and Kathleen Burke, who has the perfect look to play the seductive Panther Woman.
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