The most vicious American horror film of the 1930s. This adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau is a pre-Code and perverse nightmare in a predatory jungle setting, with Charles Laughton in one of his greatest performances. Laughton’s Dr. Moreau is a smiling torturer and the devil in a chubby man’s body. He’s an effeminate homosexual, queenly in demeanor, though he seems to get his greatest kicks from sadism and science. He lords over a whole island of experimental half-human/half-animal deformities—one of them is Bela Lugosi hidden under wolf make-up—that he’s created through vivisection. Outsider Richard Arlen has some bad luck at sea and ends up stranded there.
It’s a cult classic today, but it got mixed reviews in 1932 when many critics blasted it for being too disturbing and the United Kingdom banned it until 1958 when they finally allowed a cut version to be shown.