Critics reviews

Even taking into account its pre-Code loose leash, it's remarkable how much more daring, lurid, and intelligent this version is compared to newer models... Foregoing overwrought spectacle and forced relevance, Island of Lost Souls is able to conjure infinitely more wit and horror with just the devious glint in Laughton's eye.

The appeal of the film, aside from that utter weirdness, is how it finds that B-movie sweet spot between the tawdry and the serious. There are real technical accomplishments in the film, from the makeup to the cinematography by Karl Struss, who had been behind the camera for more respectable movies, like F.W. Murnau's classic Sunrise (1927). And even is it qualifies as primo vintage camp, there's a subversively playful bite to its allegory as well.

The dearth of music enhances the atmosphere of Darwinian unease, an uncanny hush disrupted by moans, chants, and the grinding sound of window bars being removed as the simian Caliban breaks into the bedroom of the hero's fiancée (Leila Hyams)... Consequences extend to Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Apocalypse Now and Cannibal Holocaust, Brando and Frankenheimer run with the Prospero angle in their own remarkable version.

Plotting is slack, as so often in early Hollywood - oops, we seem to have left the lab door open, allowing our uninvited guest to stumble on our mad-scientist experiments - but that's part of the charm.