hottoast

So to only further the confusion as to whether these were people transformed into animals or vice versa, consider the character of Aissa. By all accounts she looks pretty human, aside from her pointed teeth. However, if that is the case, and we are to understand that she is Dr. Moreau's daughter in a more literal sense, who is the mother? Did he have sex with a cat?! Or if she started out as a cat, how did she end up so completely human in form? Or- are we supposed to believe that not only can Moreau vivisect these animals, but completely transfigure them, Harry Potter style? The film offers no explanation, though if you do some background research, it turns out that character of Aissa originated not from the original H.G. Wells novel, but from the 1932 film, The Island of Lost Souls. The filmmakers invented the character of "The Panther Woman," a female love interest who would make the film more appealing to box office audiences. It is explained that she is derived from a panther, and Moreau is using her to entrap Parker and see if it's possible for her to fall in love with a human and bear "normal" children. Of course this too makes little sense, but at least the original adapters bothered to provide some explanation, as shoddy as it may be. In this version Aissa remains an open-ended question, and frankly kind of a crappy love interest seeing they never even kiss. So what exactly was the point of her? Also on a separate note, when Val Kilmer does his unflattering Brando impression later in the movie, it is with such blatant disregarding of the story and the actual "world" of the film. In the movie Brando talks with a pseudo-English accent, not his clipped Godfather-esque speech. Yet, Kilmer clearly had such contempt for him that he did an all out mocking impression rather than stick to the reality of the movie. If anyone was even able to buy into the fiction that they were watching Dr. Moreau & Montgomery and not Brando being a prima donna and Kilmer acting like a crazy person, this would for sure shatter it.