THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (34)

Directed by: John Frankenheimer

Starring: Marlon Brando, David Thewlis, Val Kilmer

The Pitch: On a remote Pacific island a mad scientist presides over a menagerie of half-human, half-animal mutants.

Theo Sez: Even without Brando (inspired casting, given his real-life quest for glorious isolation) this would be A-list talent, both before and behind the camera. And there's a great theme, our shameful, hidden animal sides rising up to destroy us - it has all the excitement of every film about Revolution, except that we identify (at least) equally with the oppressor as with the oppressed (or, more accurately, repressed). Yet it's a tacky movie, as old-fashioned as Brando's courtly performance but, unlike that, not deliberately evoking a more thoughtful and urbane age of action movies: it seems to have been intended as flashy, up-to-the-minute sci-fi but done in by slack plotting and whiskery prosthetics, plus a general lack of anything memorable to look at or listen to after the halfway mark. The heavyweight cast seem alternately amused and exasperated by how little is asked of them.