The Island of the Lost (1921)
** (out of 4)
A man (Alf Blutecher) sees a bottle wash up with a note in it. The note gives the location of an unknown island but what catches his attention the most is that the handwriting is that of his fiancé who went missing years earlier. The man gets a friend to go with him to the island where he meets a mad scientist experimenting with mixing human and animals.
This German film was lost for decades and very little was actually known about it. Sadly, like a lot of lost films, once a print turns up you can't help but be disappointed in what's here. This is an extremely loose adaptation of H.G. Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau and it's probably also the least entertaining. There are all sorts of problems with this movie but the biggest is the fact that the film doesn't seem to know what it wants to do. At times it plays out like a horror movie but there are other times where it seems like some sort of Keystone comedy.
One of the biggest issues I had with the film is the actual look of it. You'd hope that there would be some sort of German expressionism but that's not the case. There's no use of shadows and in fact if you knew nothing about this movie and just watched it you'd think it was made in the early 1910s. The technology and look of the picture is just plain dated even by 1921 standards. As I said, the tone of the picture shifts throughout and it's never quite clear what they're trying to do.
The performances are fairly good and there's no doubt that the monsters look very good. I was expecting something silly like a man in an ape costume but most of the actors are done up in hairy make-up effects, which look quite good and you can't help but wonder if the filmmakers behind the 1932 version had seen this or at least stills from it. THE ISLAND OF THE LOST is a film horror fans might want to see but there's no doubt that it's rather disappointing. It's not a bad movie but just one you'd have higher hopes for.
