Island of Lost Souls

This was the first sound adaptation of H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau and is still widely held to be the best. Charles Laughton plays Moreau, who is surgically converting animals into people, as a soft-voiced sadist in a velvet suit. Bela Lugosi plays the figure who steps out of the beast folk to recite the Law: are we not men? The line outlived the film. Devo took the title of their first album from it. In Britain the film stayed banned for twenty-six years. The censors refused it a certificate in 1933, in 1951 and again in 1957, citing on each occasion the scenes and dialogue concerning vivisection. It was not passed until 1958. The most disturbing thing about the production still holds: the makeup and the crowd scenes of the beast folk do not produce cheap horror but genuine revulsion, and that revulsion is precisely the film's question. Who it is for: viewers who want pre-Code Hollywood horror and Laughton at full strength. Who it is not for: anyone with no tolerance for vivisection as a subject or for the colonial imagination of the period.