Are we not men?: Listening for answers in Island of Lost Souls and Kuroneko

From its opening apparition of a derelict ship emerging from a fog to its magnificent climactic images of beast-men rising up to exact revenge on their self-proclaimed creator, Island of Lost Souls (1932), photographed by Karl Struss—who won the first Oscar for his enduringly haunting work on F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1929)—is a feast of spectacle that veers between the seductive and the grotesque. Beautifully wrought visions of land, sea and laboratory intermingle with close-ups of fire-lit faces and feline hands both delicate and claw-like, desperate to feel the warmth of a very confused castaway whose sexual desire is unknowingly drawing him closer to bestiality.

But the image that lingers with me most after watching the film, late on a chilly October night, is modest in comparison: that of a single, very hairy, pointed ear. What makes this image so memorable for me is that not only is it the first sign that something terribly strange is transpiring—a foreshadowing elegantly echoed more than 50 years later in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986)—but it is also a sort of mute instruction for all of us watching: listen. Among the shrewder choices made by director Erle C. Kenton and/or his collaborators in post-production was that of using Arthur Johnston and Sigmund Krumgold’s musical score, wonderful as it is, very sparingly. The film’s celebrated atmospherics are perfected by the absence of music to soften the agonized cries of those titular souls subjected to ongoing torture in the bluntly dubbed “House of Pain.” Those cries help make Island of Lost Souls a genuinely horrific horror movie. It was those cries I kept hearing as I tried to fall asleep.

The story, for those who don’t know, comes from H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, adapted here by Philip Wylie and Waldemar Young. It follows the ship-wrecked Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) as he’s rescued and then abandoned by a drunken sea captain on an island without a name, where mad scientist Moreau (the gloriously go-for-broke Charles Laughton) has been vivisecting his way through the animal kingdom in search of the genes that he believes urges all animals to ascend to the traits of man. Moreau lives surrounded by mutants—one played by Bela Lugosi—mostly very hairy humanoids who wear pants and rally round campfires nightly to chant out the dictates of their patriarchal, neo-colonialist master. But there is also one Lota (Kathleen Burke), the “Panther Woman,” whom Moreau, presumably unable to mate with her himself, hopes to pimp out and toss into his muddying gene pool with Parker.

It’s unlikely Island of Lost Souls would have been made just a couple of years later when the Production Code was more strictly enforced, though the film’s explicit exploration of evolutionary mayhem and trans-species lust still managed to get it banned in the UK for 25 years. These days torture has somehow been domesticated as screen “entertainment,” but Moreau’s distinctive shadow still looms over the imagination. Wells’ Moreau had to move his experiments off the grid and away from prying eyes; today he’d more likely be enjoying a brilliant career in bio-mechanics, a visionary helping to shape our post-human future. The real horror has, it seems, already started to come true.

Criterion’s exceptionally well-compiled release features their freakiest menu since Videodrome (1983); interviews with the guys from Devo, who incorporated Island into the band’s conceptual framework and helped immortalize the line, “Are we not men?”; an interview with David J. Skal regarding Wells in Hollywood; yet another excellent, bouncy, info-crammed audio commentary from Golden Age horror historian Gregory Mank; and, perhaps most fascinating, an interview with Richard Stanley, co-scenarist and original director of the infamous 1996 Island adaptation with Marlon Brando.


Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968), which Criterion released last week, is set during the Sengoku period, a time of seemingly endless war. The film begins with a horde of starved samurai entering a very modest abode inhabited by two women, the mother (Nobuko Otowa) and wife (Kei Sato) of a young man (Kichiemon Nakamura) who was conscripted into the army of a local warlord. The samurai consume all available food, rape the women and set their home on fire before disappearing into the grove from which they emerged.

The brutality of this sequence—not unlike many sequences in Island of Lost Souls—is intensified greatly by what is absent from the soundtrack. There is no dialogue whatsoever for the first ten minutes of Kuroneko, but the glances exchanged by the women and the invaders prompt you to steel yourself, and the image, manifesting only moments later, of the women’s bodies as they lay in the ashes of what was once their home—their cadavers soon approached by some rather curious cats—is both chilling and possessive of a spectral beauty that will return throughout the course of this elegant, unsettling ghost story riddled with vicious revenge and perverse reversals.

Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) scared the bejesus out of me when I saw Criterion’s release of it some years back, and Kuroneko wields a similar primal power, much of it deriving from carefully crafted details: a house that seems like a theatre of mist designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the kimono who’s outer diaphanous layer resembles the wings of a fly; the peculiar use of slow-motion or the breath that hangs in the frigid air. The script was founded on a Japanese folktale, yet it holds extra resonance due to Shindo’s class-conscious subtext. The film’s influence can be found everywhere in more recent Japanese horror films, though it received a negligent release in North America in its day. Metro Cinema screened it back in August and Criterion’s deluxe treatment should secure it the much wider audience it deserves. See it when it’s dark out. But listen carefully, too.

Yurt not the boss of me: Tulpan

There’s this image in Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan that lingers in your mind long after seeing it, perhaps because it sort of sums up the particular blend of utter strangeness and delight that this film invokes so eloquently. Asa (Askhat Kuchencherekov) is moving along the vast flatness of some Kazakh steppe with his buddy Boni, who drives this souped-up tractor pasted over with tittie pics, blasting Boney M’s rendition of ‘Rivers of Babylon’ through the stereo on endless repeat. Asa dangles his slight frame off the edge of the vehicle as though he’s a sail catching the wind, doing so with a capacity for joy and optimism that silently defies whatever glum presumptions you might have of the two worlds he’s moving between, one being that of a low ranking officer in the Russian navy, the other that of a nomadic shepherd trying to support a family in this hardscrabble wilderness that might as be the fucking moon to most of us, so wildly desolate is the landscape, so remote from modern comforts.

Though straddling two worlds and probably not fitting in very well with either, Asa’s young and optimistic. He wants to get married and start a family and have some sheep and a settlement of his own, through he dreams not of a traditional yurt like his sister and her husband and their three kids inhabit, but some sort of big, Western-style spread with electricity, running water, and satellite TV. He is above all a dreamer, which doesn’t help much when there’s sheep to be herded and children to be clothed and fed. But the world around him is changing, a lifestyle is vanishing, and maybe some sort of special human fortitude along with it, so maybe a dreamer is just what’s needed to make the transition. He gets a hard time from his gruff brother-in-law Ondas, who doesn’t believe Asa has what it takes to build the sort of life Ondas has so tirelessly forged. And he gets little sympathy from the family of Tulpan, the “neighbour” girl whose hand he comes asking for in marriage. It makes for one of the funniest scenes in the film, Asa trying to impress Tulpan’s parents with his sailor suit and his terrifying and no doubt very tall tales of survival amidst the deep-sea food chain. “God, is she beautiful!” Asa raves at one point about Tulpan. But for all his efforts he’s never even been granted a peek of the girl he so wants to make his. Again, it’s all a dream.

Winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Tulpan is some kind of wonder. A bit like Atanarjuat, it offers an unusual combination of elements, a narrative that roughly adheres to a genre convention or two, a startling and rigorous ethnographic study, and a distinctive cinematic approach to characters that for the most part have likely never stepped inside a cinema in their lives. The results no doubt have a lot to do with the depth of Dvortsevoy’s investment into the people and place before his camera. He was born in Kazakhstan, and lived there for 28 years while working for an aviation company and developing his chops as a documentary filmmaker. He spent months casting the nonprofessional actors and then brought them out to live in a yurt for a month before production began. He’s said that only about 20% of the film was fully planned out, while the other 80% was prompted to some degree by the environment and its wildlife, which is found to be bursting with personality. When you see the film, you’ll understand just how attuned to its environment Tulpan really is. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that Dvortsevoy’s camera captures miracles. Messy miracles.

Of course, there are miracles and there are miracles. Kuchencherekov’s performance is itself something that verges on the transcendent, not only when he’s under extreme duress, but also when he’s just trying to drum up some good faith. Asa seems endearingly innocent to his lack of conventional handsomeness, and there’s a terrific scene in which he displays a picture of Prince Charles as evidence that guys with jug ears can be glamorous, too. It’s another sparkling moment of dry comedy, but there’s something more to it, something that testifies to the breadth of what movies can do, taking us to the loneliest places on the world, patiently waiting to find some vision to film there that’s pulled straight out of the uniqueness of that place, and still in the end coming up with something that has genuine old fashioned movie charisma.

Worldly goods, worldly bads: Clive Owen follows the money in The International

“I’m from the Bronx, so you gotta make it simple,” says a soon to be disposed of INTERPOL agent. Discreetly poisoned, he collapses only moments after his Berlin rendezvous with a representative of the evil International Bank of Business and Credit. As fellow agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) rushes to his rescue—only to himself collapse after being knocked upside the head by a truck’s side mirror—we quickly reckon that the intrigue we’re about to be plunged into will be anything but simple. Yet The International, written by Eric Singer and directed by Tom Twyker, wants to cater to those intellectually self-effacing Bronx-dwellers and other ostensibly dopey audience members, so while the plot becomes more wildly convoluted with each passing scene, the glut of platitudes and expository dialogue will attempt counterbalance.

The IBBC trades in more than cash. They’ve cut deals with just about every multinational, hold ties with multiple government agencies, and are single-handedly backing an armed revolution in Liberia. Apt pupils of the shock doctrine, their goal is to cultivate conflicts and control incurred debt. Along the way they’ll force a few hands, if not cut them off. From a previous post at Scotland Yard to his current gig with the apparently ineffectual INTERPOL—the other International of the title—Salinger’s long been crusading to bring these jackals to justice. With the help of a Manhattan DA lawyer (Naomi Watts), Salinger may finally be closing in, valiantly following a series of brutal incidents that could lead to the top: an IBBC VP dies under questionable circumstances, an Italian arms manufacturer and presidential candidate is assassinated, a tailing operation leads to a major shootout in the Guggenheim.

There are splendid bits of character work, such as Salinger’s tendency to have his ears injured, this man who hears too much. There are riveting set pieces, the one in the Gug being especially bracing. There is a surprisingly sinister resolution implying that vigilantism maybe the only way of dealing with powers higher than governments, and there's something weirdly assuring in how it proves that criminal networks will ultimately take care of their own. There’s also an inspired cell phone gag, though elsewhere Twyker’s attempt to wring tension out of text messaging falls flat. And there’s a lot of dragging scenes out, with padded entrances and exits or yet another show-offy bird’s eye shot, even when the scenes in question aren’t very exciting or essential to the story. When it all comes together it’s a great coulda-beena-Bond part for Owen and a decent stab at exposing the perils of globalization, but the state of the dialogue doesn’t bode well for Singer’s prospects and Twyker has yet to recover from Perfume. He made his mark with Run Lola Run over a decade ago, and some—I for one haven’t kept up—argue he’s been smudging it ever since.