YMMV / Island of Lost Souls

• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: In the original novel, the only major characters were Moreau, Pendrick, Montgomery, and the Sayer of the Law (M'Ling and Captain Davies also appear in the novel). Lota, the part-panther woman, wasn't part of the original story (there WAS, however, a puma woman, which Lota may have been inspired by). Since this film, each adaptation has a part-feline female character (e.g. Maria in the 1977 adaptation and Aissa in the 1996 adaptation).
• Complete Monster: The wicked Dr. Moreau, to create humans from animals, experiments horrifically on them, changing them into malformed creatures. When they are fully sapient beings, Moreau continues to torture them in his House of Pain without anesthetic, vivisecting them again and again. Upon the arrival of others to the island, Moreau orders the deaths of anyone who could be a problem, even trying to have a woman raped to see if offspring with his creatures is possible.
• Narm: The scene where Dr. Moreau ends the explanation of his work by trying to recline downward on a gurney. You can see Charles Laughton trying to make it work but it's hard to look smug and insane when you have nothing to perch on.
• Special Effect Failure: When the captain tosses Parker overboard onto Dr. Moreau's ship it's very clearly a dummy being tossed. If a real human fell onto a boat like that they would snap their neck.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: If you delete or reduce the character of Ruth and simply have Edward and Lota together, look closely and the film could've been as timeless, if not more so, than the novel, for this Odd Couple could've made for a genius commentary on cross-racial marriage. H.G.Wells himself did not think of this, and this was the 1930s, so this could've been very clever. But with the addition of Ruth, that concept is simply thrown away. It doesn't help that Lota is killed in a fight with Ouran to protect the man she still loves, even despite him having a fiancée in Ruth.

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