Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain (2003)

Directed by Charles Band
Written by Earl Kenton
Starring
- John Patrick Jordan
- Jessica Lancaster
- Debra Mayer
- Jacob Witkin
- Loriele New
Produced by Mitchell Welch, Kurt Iswarienko, and Johnny Nisbet
Executive produced by Charles Band (uncredited, but come on)

I may be in the humbling position of reviewing the last gasp of Charles Band, filmmaker. Band’s post-Full Moon successor company, Shadow Entertainment, has slackened off its release of even the most impoverished productions; the last two DVDs bearing the logo, Tales of Terror and Horrific, are simply re-edited versions of earlier Full Moon features, cut down into individual segments of anthology videos. Band’s most recent attempt at a feature, Puppet Master: The Legacy, is really clips from all of the previous installments in the franchise strung together with as little connecting original footage as possible. So Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain, directed by Band himself (for the first time in the director’s for a full feature under his own name since 1999’s Blood Dolls), may be the final huzzah.

What a way to go.

This is, I should tell you, a period flick, and in so informing you I’m doing something for you that the DVD cover did not do for me. I rarely wax opinionated on such things as video covers — they’re even less relevant to an evaluation of a movie than DVD extras — but one has to wonder at the marketing strategy behind creating a period movie and then releasing it in such a format that no one could guess that period setting. (Not that I think there’s a great video-store contingent out there specifically seeking hardboiled-era monster flicks — but if marketing prospects were so slim, why make the movie in the first place?)

Really, this epitomizes the movie right here.

But I digress. (That’s not an apology, it’s a statement of fact. That’s what I do.)

As soon as the movie opened, I felt sympathy for any viewers who weren’t watching it the way I was watching it, i.e., with a clipboard on my lap. The first scene is a conversation between three people in a car, and there was enough expository detail about characters and their relationships that I felt I should have traded my clipboard for a whiteboard.

Here’s what we’ve got: Eric (John Patrick Jordan) is a young second-rate boxer, fresh off a victory against a scarcely mobile opponent. He’s trying to find his brother Roy, who disappeared sometime in the recent past. In the car with him, and helping him in his quest, are Marianne (Debra Mayer), reporter for a Hollywood ragsheet, and Judith (Jessica Lancaster), occupation unknown, Roy’s squeeze. The nightclub they’re parked outside is one in which Roy was rumored to have spent a lot of time recently, so Eric’s on his way in to find out what he can.

Which puts us right into where you suspected we’d be all along: The strip act! Alianna (Loriele New) comes out on stage for her whip-and-strip routine while Eric’s trying to get some info out of the barkeep, and naturally all conversation stops. My reaction: “Wow, strippers back then were bulimically skinny with really unconvincing implants? Who knew?” All Eric can get from the bartender is that Roy was hot for Alliana, who is now coming under the desirous eye of a local gangster.

Costumes by Technicolor!

Eric follows Alliana out to her car after her act, but gangster boy beats him to it and tries to force his attentions on Alliana — at which point Alliana snarls and puts her fist clean through the gangster’s skull. (I had assumed that the proudly-displayed “NOT RATED” on the DVD cover was simply the result of Band trying to find a new way to save money, but seeing how squeaky-clean many of the later Full Moon flicks had to be to secure their “R” rating, that may not be the only reason.)

Eric runs back to his car, and they follow Alliana to an old Hollywood estate which Marianne knows from its former use as a sanitarium of ill repute, as well as previously being a party pad with hidden tunnels and such beneath the grounds. Having disgorged her last lump of exposition, Marianne is promptly grabbed and hauled away into the darkness by a slobbering thing with an animal face.

(Okay, let’s think about this. There are two of you, a young woman and a fighter who’s already taken his professional lumps for the evening; neither of you are armed. You know that the unfamiliar property on which you’re trespassing is home at least to the Iron-Fisted Stripper and a beer-bellied beastie. Question: How stupid are you? Answer: Well, the credits don’t roll as they hightail it for the police station, so…)

“And you ought to hear my Sean Connery imitation.”

Alliana presents the mostly-intact body of the gangster to — Dr. Moreau (Jacob Witkin)! Boy, I love those new truth-in-advertising regulations. Moreau’s attended by two “manimals”: Peewee (B.J. Smith), the aforementioned slobberer who’s part mountain lion and part hyena, and Gallagher (Peter D. Badalamenti II), the diminutive pig-faced critter with the annoying voice. Moreau’s in the market for body parts to help accelerate the transition of his manimals to full human status, but unfortunately, the gangster’s organs are already riddled with yellow fever. Good thing that this carload of young’n'fit clean-living types decided to follow Alliana home.

Here’s the twist, such as it is: Moreau’s not in charge of the madhouse. The manimals keep him chained to the furniture so he can switch out organs for them. The house was once the sanitarium run by Pak (Ling Aum), Moreau’s former assistant back in the early days on their infamous island, and Pak’s in competition with the manimals to get Moreau to help his daughter Gorgona (Laura Ushijima), who was saddled with half a fish-face through Moreau’s experiments. Moreau, prisoner though he be, still sees cosmic value in his experiments, and wishes Alliana, a former leopard now almost fully humanized, to make with some strong young stud (a boxer, perhaps?) to create the next, complete generation. Oh, and the male manimals are horny too.

I hope that’s enough little subplots to keep you amused. Unfortunately, the philosophy behind the script seems to have been “Keep on having stuff happen until we’ve padded it out to just-barely feature length and can kill most everyone off.” Eric and Judith get captured; Marianne gets clawed to pieces by a frustrated Peewee; Alliana has sex with Eric; Pak and Moreau argue; Moreau explains his whole theory of bioethics to Eric; Gallagher forces his attentions on Judith under the pretense of wanting to help her escape; Pak weeps over his fish-faced daughter.

It’s a very limited cast of manimals compared to the original novel and movie versions to which this is an unofficial sequel (what were you expecting?), but at least the makeup is competent, thanks to John Carl Buechler (working with Band again solely for old times’ sake?). Peewee’s face seems to have been done as a single-piece appliance, the fishy side of Gorgona’s face inflates and deflates with bladder-controlled gill action, and Gallagher’s pig head is a molded mask that moves as his mouth moves. Sure, you can often see the actor’s real mouth inside the pig lips, but suppose if I can forgive it in the case of Roddy McDowell in the Planet of the Apes movies, I can OWWW! Who knew getting struck by lightning for blasphemy hurt so much?

“Now, did you order the flounder or the porkchop?”

Sadly, much of the rest of the production seems to look upon “competent” and “adequate” as superlative goals, devoutly to be wished but never honestly striven for. The acting? Well, you can’t condemn the acting ensemble too harshly given the plodding nature of most of the dialogue given them, and Jacob Witkin as Moreau proves that a genteel British accent can bring a certain measure of decorum to almost anything. On the other hand, Badalamenti as Gallagher seems determined to play his part as “Babe gone bad.” And if there’s one eternal truth to be drawn from the scores of bad movies I’ve seen, it’s this: Do not hire a stripper to act.

Although, frankly… I mentioned earlier that Loriele New is skinny. But even by modern, anorexic standards, she’s practically emaciated. When your lips stick out from your face, not from collagen injections but because the surrounding skin is stretched between between your cheekbone and your jawline as tight as a tent cord, you seriously need to start adding cheeseburgers to your menu. And the sight of her, naked (I mean Brazilian-wax naked), displaying corded tendons and delineated muscle fiber through parchment-thin skin… Well, I had to go cruise the internet for Gil Elvgren pinups for half an hour afterward to set my mind right.

Notably unnotable is the pedestrian visual style of direction. Everything’s technically adequate, but nothing really rises above a “point and shoot” ethic in recording what happens in front of the cameras. After directing a couple dozen films himself and looking over the director’s shoulder on literally scores of movies while holding the checkbook, one could reasonably have hoped that Band would have picked up some directorial technique which could have contributed to the overall visual style without burdening the stretched-thin budget. I mean, think what Danny Draven could have done with the reported budget of $300,000 (and real film in the cameras!).

(Yes, it’s possible; duct tape was invented during World War 2.)

There are yet, in this plausibly final Charles Band movie, glimmers of Full Moon hallmarks: Creatures whose paucity is compensated (or at least the attempt is made) by brandable novelty, and a harking back to historical entertainment in its high concept (both old gangster era movies and the various incarnations and imitations of H.G. Wells’ novel). Unfortunately, the flaws reminiscent of the Full Moon heyday also stand out, most notably a production significantly hobbled by a low budget and a story without nearly enough ambition to tackle the potential of the initial idea. And without the Full Moon brand and the fan goodwill that once flourished in the early 1990s, this is simply a movie that will be passed over and, if seen, forgotten.

(A sidenote: It seems that in the rush to distribution, the back of the DVD cover was filled out with a plot description that I can only imagine came from an early proposal for the movie which was changed dramatically in preproduction. Again, not that I like focusing on presentation rather than the film itself but… Eric’s brother sought out Moreau for a medical problem? Eric finds his brother, turned into a half-panther? None of that is in the finished movie; in fact, Eric’s brother never makes an appearance and barely rates a mention after the plot starts rolling, leaving him a half-forgotten McGuffin.)