With the release of Lost Soul on blu-ray, we take a look at the career of Richard Stanley.
South African writer-director Richard Stanley is among
the most idiosyncratic and eccentric cult filmmakers of the last decade. The descendant of famed journalist and
explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley and anthropologist Penny Miller, Stanley’s
upbringing was shrouded in South African mythology, folklore, witchcraft and
magic. Donning the regalia of a modern
day necromancer, Stanley’s penchant for the gothic and industrial landed him
music video work for Fields of the
Nephilim, Public Image Limited and
Renegade Soundwave. Before he knew it, Stanley broke into the
mainstream with his 1990 post-apocalyptic science fiction debut Hardware, establishing a rapport with
future Miramax figureheads Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Stanley was suddenly an exciting and original
name to pay attention to in the cinema world.
Unfortunately, trouble began to befall the young South
African auteur with his supernatural follow-up Dust Devil when Miramax recut the film against his wishes. The nail in the coffin for Stanley was the
ill-fated production of H.G. Wells’ seminal novel The Island of Doctor Moreau for New Line Cinema in 1996. Stanley spent four years developing arguably
his most personal project of his career only to have saboteurs Marlon Brando
and Val Kilmer make the first few days of production a living hell before
Stanley was ultimately replaced with John Frankenheimer and the script doctored
into an unrecognizable mess. Since the
massive blow to his hubris, Stanley withdrew from the filmmaking world and
retreated into the mountains before quietly resurfacing to contribute short
film work to anthological features and documentaries. With the recent release of the documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard
Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, the Movie Sleuth takes a concerted look at
the sadly troubled career of one of cinema’s most wholly original and unique
auteurs ripe for rediscovery and reappraisal.
Hardware
(1990)
Inspired by the short 2000 AD comic strip, Hardware
tells the post-apocalyptic futuristic tale of Moses “Hard Mo” Baxter (Dylan
McDermott), a former soldier living with his unemployed girlfriend Jill (Stacey
Travis) in their squalid, claustrophobic apartment amid urban decay. One day, Hard Mo surprises Jill with a gift
in the form of a broken robot head he purchased from a scavenger, a present she
eagerly accepts before sculpting it into a piece of art. Unbeknownst to either of them, the head of
the robot belongs to M.A.R.K 13 unit which has the capacity to rebuild itself
no matter how many times its destroyed or torn apart and before they know it,
the machine wreaks bloody ultraviolent and increasingly hallucinatory havoc in
their apartment.
In the pantheon of post-apocalyptic science fiction
films such as Mad Max and deadly
robot films such as The Terminator with
low budget fare like Robot Jox coming
to mind, Hardware manages to separate
itself from the pack purely by Stanley’s approach to the material. First off is the distinctive visual style,
drenched in deep reds of desert terrain before withdrawing into the
claustrophobic blue and neon-red hues of the heroes’ apartment. Then there’s the narrative approach, which
seems to be telling a conventional story but stylizes it with asides such as
Iggy Pop’s cantankerous radio DJ lamenting the crumbling world around him
intercut with surreal television programs resembling some of writer-director
Richard Stanley’s earlier music video work.
In a conscious break with reality, there’s a thread involving one of the
characters being injected with M.A.R.K. 13 blood and the increasingly bizarre
hallucinations which follow once it hits his bloodstream. In keeping with the director’s music-video
work is the gothic industrial soundtrack with music by Public Image Limited,
Motorhead, Ministry and Iggy Pop, forming an anarchic soundscape that benefits
the bleak and grungy feel of the film beautifully. While ostensibly it’s a rock-em-sock-em man
vs. machine thriller, it’s full of otherworldly anecdotes and a peculiar
approach to storytelling which would make the likes of Terry Gilliam
blush.
Hardware,
as they say, isn’t for everyone. Much
like Robocop, the film was given the
dreaded X rating by the MPAA for its extreme violence and graphic sexuality
before ultimately being toned down to an R for theatrical exhibition. Upon initial release, the mainstream critical
establishment was less than kind to what they saw as an ‘unoriginal punk
ripoff’ of James Cameron’s The Terminator. Despite the negative reactions, the film
grossed around $5.7 million against its $1.5 million production budget, making
it a minor success. As a piece of
storytelling it’s a little disjointed and regular composer Simon Boswell’s
synthetic score doesn’t do much to hide the budgetary limitations. Still, in the pantheon of dystopian
cybernetic thrillers, Hardware leaves
an indelible impression on all who see it with saturated images of deserted
landscapes, rusting derelicts with few inhabitants surviving however they can
and a truly disorienting approach to editing.
If only more directors like Neil Blomkamp knew how to make their science
fiction robot thrillers this bizarre and affronting.
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Dust
Devil (1992)
Described as ‘Tarkovsky on acid’, Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil is a surreal horror thriller
follow-up to Hardware which maintains the aforementioned film’s
dusty and squalid terrain with a greater emphasis on the sweat and sand
drenched atmospherics and an even stronger penchant for the occult, witchcraft
and demonology. Closer to Stanley’s
South African roots with locations dancing between the deserted Nambia and
Johannesburg (a Blomkamp favorite), the film tells the tale of a lone
ritualistic serial murderer (Robert John Burke) wandering the deserted
landscape who may in fact be a transformative demon with supernatural powers
known as a naghtloeper or ‘dust devil’.
With the dwindling police force hot on his tail in the form of Sergeant
Ben Mukurob (Zakes Mokae from Wes Craven’s The
Serpent and the Rainbow), the inhuman drifter sets his sights on his next
victim, a married woman named Wendy Robinson (Chelsea Field) in the midst of
marital crisis with her domineering yet nebbish husband Mark (Rufus
Swart). Thus begins a multidimensional
supernatural showdown of metaphysics, voodoo, combatting spiritual forces amid
Sangomas and the unforgiving elements of the deserted terrain.
From the outset, Dust
Devil looks to have been one grueling task for the cast and crew to
undertake. Between the relentlessness of
the atmosphere, scouting the ghost town locations of abandoned cities, movie
theaters covered in sand, dingy hotels and even grungier bars, it’s the perfect
playing field for Hell, fire and brimstone on Earth. It’s also far more violent and sexually
disturbing than Hardware with an
equally unstoppable villain who cannot be deterred by conventional means. Given Richard Stanley’s own affinity for
witchcraft, Dust Devil allows the
writer-director to unfurl all of his obsessions with the occult and spiritual
forces in the universe. It also, like Hardware, presents a resourceful heroine
with more fire in her soul than meets the eye who will stop at nothing when
going toe to toe with evil incarnate.
Having seen Zakes Mokae as a villain practicing voodoo in Wes Craven’s
film, it’s refreshing to see him on the opposite side of the fence as an
equally lost wanderer who only knows that he must expel the dust devil from the
Earth.
Long before Stanley experienced the devastating
debacle that was The Island of Dr. Moreau,
the young auteur began experiencing problems well beyond his control or
imagining with Dust Devil. In 1992, after turning over a 120 minute
rough cut of the film, British production-company Palace Pictures folded and
Stanley lost his right to final cut.
Where Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Pictures championed Hardware, they hated Dust Devil and shortened the film to 87
minutes from its original 120 minute length against Stanley’s wishes. It wasn’t until 2006 that Stanley was able to
reacquire full control of the picture and reassembled a new director’s cut
running at 105 minutes in length, aptly named The Final Cut. The film
briefly surfaced on a limited edition three-disc DVD from Subversive Cinema
before going out of print until Hardware
and Lost Soul distributor Severin
Films announced a forthcoming Blu-Ray edition with new extras in the works by
Stanley himself. In the years since its
release, Dust Devil has maintained a
cult following as a spiritual successor to Hardware
in terms of technique and fulfillment of the director’s idiosyncratic
obsessions with the occult and forces beyond our own world. If anything, there’s little scarier than
being relentlessly pursued by a shape shifting demon able to use elemental
forces of the world against us.
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Lost
Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2014)
Richard Stanley spent four years developing what would
be the most painstaking personal project of his career only to have it taken
away from him by New Line Cinema three days into filming before being replaced
by John Frankenheimer with his script altered beyond recognition. Originally planned as a modestly budgeted $6
million independent feature, the budget ballooned to a whopping $35 million
(around $125 million with adjusted inflation) once Hollywood whacko bad boys
Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer signed on.
With the release of the documentary Lost
Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, the
legendary catastrophic production of what became one of the biggest box office
bombs and worst reviewed films in cinema history is even more insane and tragic
than you’ve been led to believe.
Based on an original script by Richard Stanley with
contributions by historian Michael Herr (who provided voiceover narration for Apocalypse Now), Stanley sought to get
to the heart of Wells who infamously never liked any of the adaptations of his
work including dismissing Island of Lost
Souls which was made when he was still alive. After scouting locations in rain forests near
North Queensland, Australia with costumes and a cast in place, Stanley’s hopes
to tell The Island of Dr. Moreau faithfully
to H.G. Wells’ original story were dashed the moment Val Kilmer walked on
set. While Marlon Brando was a notorious
hellraiser himself, Kilmer refused to take direction or deliver the dialogue as
written and the dailies were considered useless. At one point, Kilmer held a cigarette up to
the cinematographer’s head and started to burn the man’s hair, sparking anger
within the Australian crew who were tired of taking his bullying prima donna
crap. There was a rumor floating around
that after a day of haggling with Kilmer, Stanley actually climbed up into a
treetop and wouldn’t come down.
Actress
and friend of Stanley, Fairuza Balk, was so incensed by her friend being fired
by the studio she tried to escape production before being caught at the airport
with threats that her career would be destroyed if she tried it again. Then there’s Marlon Brando’s antics,
frequently showing up late and unprepared, dressed in a white silk cloth
resembling an overgrown diaper with an ice bucket attached to his head and
2-foot tall man Nelson de la Rosa recast at Brando’s behest as his miniature
sidekick, inspiring the Austin Powers mini-me
meme. To top it off, Stanley’s curiosity
of what was happening to his baby after being replaced by John Frankenheimer
got the better of him and he snuck back on the set as an extra creature and
even managed to appear in shots of the finished film, sparking fears he might
try and sabotage the production.
As a documentary, it mostly consists of retrospective
interviews with the key players including producers and New Line founder Bob
Shaye recalling the chaos of the project.
Everyone had bad vibes about the state of the project but so much money
and time was already invested it was decided that they should follow through
with the disastrous endeavor anyway.
Richard Stanley invites sympathy for his plight and is well spoken in
interviews, although the documentary doesn’t take the easy biased route and side
completely with him. Throughout, we hear
from producers the reclusive and mercurial Stanley wasn’t exactly the easiest
guy to work with either, often staying home when he should have attended
production meetings and handing out storyboards to the cast and crew as a form
of direction. Whether or not Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau would have bettered
Frankenheimer’s remains to be seen, but what is here joins Lost in La Mancha and Jodorowsky’s
Dune as a bittersweet rumination on what might have been. And when you’re not lamenting the mistreatment
of Stanley, a move that hurt him so badly he retreated from feature film
directing for many years, you’re in awe of the insanity Kilmer, Brando and de
la Rosa brewed on set in one of the greatest cinematic misfires ever committed
to celluloid.
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-Andrew Kotwicki