Blood Creature (1959)
For those of you that can't get enough of those silly stories about mad scientists who somehow think that giving plastic surgery to large non-biped animals is going to turn those animals into people, we have this Filipino version of H.G. Wells' story, The Island of Dr. Moreau. This version isn't as flamboyant as the more popular Charles Laughton version (Island Of Lost Souls), chiefly because there is no one here poured into a white ice cream suit like the tubby Moreau was in that version.
However, for those of you that demand action of the portly kind and think that every Moreau-style movie needs a beefy element, there is a particularly horrific scene where the doctor's assistant, Walter, comes out of a house with his shirt unbuttoned and his beer belly hanging out. It isn't often that I gasp during a movie anymore, but I'm man enough to admit that I felt a sharp intake of breath as I got a gander at that quarter ton of fun rumbling off into the jungle, no doubt in search of some Ho-Ho flavored fruit.
Like all versions of Moreau (if you're going to steal from the best, why change anything at all?), this one starts off with some scruffy shipwreck survivor. His name is William Fitzgerald and his boat blew up and he was the only survivor. He's some type of petroleum engineer, so he's obviously well-qualified to help out the mad doctor that inhabits the island. The mad doctor this time around has been renamed Dr. Charles Girard and he's nowhere near as cool as Laughton's Moreau.
Girard is vaguely Latin and is pretty much just a regular old scientist who is really into his work and ignores his pretty wife. There's no bullwhip here and no scenes where he sets himself up as his creations' God. I've already mentioned another big difference between Girard and Moreau. Girard actually has a wife, whereas Moreau, had, um, a whip, I guess, oh and the white suit, too. Her name is Frances and she's a bit miffed because he's spending all this time on his experiments, but really what pisses her off is that she had to spend two years on this island with Walter and it's hot there an awful lot, requiring lots of what could be called "shirt optional, grotesquely distended belly mandatory" lab days.
Once Fitzgerald is rescued by Girard and Walter, we begin to learn a little bit about the situation on the island. Obviously, since Fitzgerald isn't the blonde bimbo married to Girard or his tubby assistant, he wonders about when a boat will show up so that he can go back to the States. Oh, there's not any boat coming says, Girard. Okay, then we should probably radio the shore and have them send someone, okay? You know, we just don't have any radios at the moment. Sorry. Even though it looks like Fitzgerald is going to have go the old message in bottle routine, he doesn't seem too upset with the prospect of spending the rest of his days on this island.
Around this time, Walter announces to Girard that some beast is on the loose. This is the first inkling we have that this is going to be a Dr. Moreau situation. It's made clear that having the beast on the loose is a bad thing and we learn that the beast has killed several people during its many self-approved furloughs. If your experimental man-beast keeps escaping, you might want to look into a better brand of cat carrier.
Now, this animal stalks the night and puts a big scare into the villagers by eating one of them or something, causing them to take off in their boats and desert the island. I found this interesting since Girard said they were 1000 miles off the coast of Peru. I'm not real familiar with the geography of the area, but I'm assuming that there's probably not a whole lot of places to go. It's not like hoping on I-70 and driving to Kansas City. Also, couldn't Girard have told Fitzgerald to get one of these villages to give him a lift in their canoes to where ever? If he's conducting secret experiments and playing God, wouldn't he want to get rid of the outsider as soon as possible?
Fitzgerald is rapidly assigned a servant boy named Tiago who provides him with breakfast, a good shave, and a clean set of clothes. Tiago also provides him with a good luck charm that doesn't have much to do with anything except it's an easy way to foreshadow the problems to come. You know - man-beast on the loose, mad scientist playing God, lard ass assistant trying to rape blonde hussy - that sort of thing.
Fitzgerald runs into Girard and his buddies in the jungle and they tell him to watch it because there's a freshly dug pit they've rigged up to catch the beast that's on the loose. Girard is a bit vague as to what sort of animal he's trying to trap and Fitzgerald offers to help, but instead ends up hanging out with Mrs. Girard. Later he ends up hanging out on her lips when she's lolling around on the beach and bemoaning the fact that her husband would rather mount a expedition to trap the creature rather than her. As you can imagine, Fitzgerald completely understands her feelings as well as her voluptuous figure and they immediately fall in love.
Back on the "monster-on-the-loose" front, once the creature is trapped, the doctor does some more experiments on it. This involves a scene where he cuts into the creature's skin. It seemed fairly graphic for the time period, but I guess when you're filming your movie all the way out in the Philippines, who's going to be out there telling you that you can't do that?
Fitzgerald, having nothing better to do (until his date with the scientist's wife later that night) decides to pitch in and see if he can't play a little part in creating life. I wasn't sure exactly where Fitzgerald was coming from. He was ready to pitch in and help out the guy, then started snooping around and found out that Girard was going to be using a panther and turn it into a man, then had one of those "important" discussions with Girard about how man shouldn't try and create life, but should just sit back and let nature take its course, then he was all about helping Girard out again. He just didn't seem to have strong convictions either way. I guess when you're shipwrecked on an island with a mad scientist and his busty blonde wife, it pays to be a bit pragmatic.
Following an attempted rape and the monster getting whipped with a belt, a final confrontation ensues that involved Tiago offering his hand to the creature and somehow not getting it bit off. I had no idea what happened at the end. It was night, the print stunk, and the monster was coming toward Tiago, then suddenly the monster disappeared leaving Fitzgerald to suddenly wonder when his boat was coming to take him off the island.
This one wasn't too bad, but was hampered by the quality of the print used. The performances here were solid enough, with the character of Girard being a cut above the usual ego-maniac freak. He wasn't a complete jerk like Laughton's Moreau, but then he didn't have the same motivations or sexual orientation issues that Moreau had. The tropical locales (what I could see of them, that is) let this effort stand out from the usual low budget mad-scientist affair and you'd wish they would have taken better advantage of their shooting location and featured it more prominently. An okay film, whose presentation is completely botched in this release by those cheap losers at Madacy.