Very Cool!!!

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Dr. Moreau's House of Pain is set in the 40's where boxer Eric Carson (John Patrick Jordan) is searching for his brother Roy who has mysteriously disappeared, Eric traces Roy last known sighting to a seedy strip bar & is told Roy was last seen with exotic dancer Alliana (Lorielle New) & Eric decides to confront her. However Eric sees Alliana kill a man in an alley & instead decides to follow her along with a newspaper reporters named Mary Anne (Debra Mayer) & Judith (Jessica Lancaster), Alliana drives to a disused sanatorium & while following her Mary Anne is kidnapped by a mutant creature. Eric & Judith try to find Mary Anne but only end up imprisoned themselves by several half human half animal mutants created by the sadistic Dr. Moreau (Jacob Witkin) who has been carrying out gruesome experiments in order to create a perfect half human half animal hybrid & he is always on the look out for fresh victims to experiment on...Directed by legendary low budget film maker Charles Band this has nothing to do with classic novel by H.G. Wells other than call an evil scientist Dr. Moreau & feature some manimals, overall this is a pretty poor effort in terms of plot but it is quite well made although I am not sure if that's much of a trade-off. The script was obviously based around the fact the production had no money & sets 90% of it in a few rooms & corridors with a very small cast too, the story doesn't grab you & there's no real build up to the revelation of the manimals & if you think about it for any length of time it all falls apart. At just over 70 odd minutes in length it's short but I did think it dragged at times & when your film is only 70 odd minutes long the one thing it shouldn't do is drag. The character's are bland & it's unclear what the ultimate purpose of Dr Moreau's experiments are, the dialogue is average & not enough happens really, the house of pain part of the title also might be rather misleading as this is quite tame.The manimal make-up effects are quite poor, it's too obvious that the actor's are wearing cheap face mask's especially the half man half pig manimal. There are one or two moments of gore, a fist is punched through someones head, there's a slashed open stomach, a slit throat & some blood splatter but not much else. There isn't even much nudity as only one woman gets her kit off & even she isn't that attractive. The one thing that does stand out here is the colourful photography by Mac Ahlberg who photographed most of Band's better films during his Empire Pictures days, while most of the scene remains dark people's clothes or light sources are bright neon colours which looks quite cool actually at times. There's a nod to Re-Animator (1985) as bright green liquid is syringes are seen & that fire axe on the back of that door which never gets used looks very much like the one used at the end of Re-Animator...With a supposed budget of about $300,000 effort was obviously put into the look of Dr. Moreau's House of Pain but that sort of effort is sorely lacking in just about every other department & never rises above average. The acting is forgettable, the plodding dialogue doesn't do anyone anyone any favours though.Dr. Moreau's House of Pain looks alright but the film feels padded at even 70 odd minutes as various little things happen to merely fill the time it seems, it looks quite nice I suppose but that's about the best I can say for it. Watch the original The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) again instead.

You know, I had a dream a while back in which I opined the paucity of movies featuring bare breasts and half human, half pig hybrids. "Why oh why oh why," I cried, "Can we not see more breasts and pig men?" Well, fear not my fellow brutarians, Dr Moreau is here to answer all of our prayers.Directed by Charles Band, he of low budget horror legend status, unhealthy obsessed by killer doll movies (Blood Dolls, Puppet Master, Dollman vs. Demonic Toys) here he takes a stab at the film noir genre, bringing us a tale of human / animal experimentation in Prohibition era America.All the noir trappings are there: smoky streets, illuminated only by atmospheric streetlamps, wiseguys in brimmed hats, broads in fur coats and shawls with cigarette holders stuck between their well rouged lips, and automobiles relevant to the period and, it must be stressed, for a low budget movie he does a remarkable job of 'placing' the movie.Whilst the plot is a fairly silly one, involving a young man searching for his brother who went to Dr. Moreau for treatment and was transformed into half man, half big cat, the trappings surrounding it work very well.Whilst hardly Orwellian, the script is nevertheless effective enough, and the acting more than passable.So, if you, like me, find yourself yearning for those hybrids anytime soon, you could do worse than check this out

If your goal is to rent something bad and critique it then go find a TROMA film and have at it! If, on the other hand you like being pleasantly surprised at what can be done on a low budget then this film is an excellent example.Charles Band is- an inconsistent director. Some of the films he's done are crap but others are Brilliant and explain his high status in the industry. Dr. Moraeu's House of Pancakes is a very watchable very enjoyable film with better than average Make-up fx and NO CG! not any to speak of anyway. The Make-up effects while conceived by old favorite John Buechler are fleshy and visceral and more than competently done by Veteran Bruce Barlow considering the budget and shooting schedule. Sets and art direction are key to what make this such a fun watchable movie and Mac Ahlberg's lighting and photography bring this to the caliber of many of it's bigger budgeted rivals. Judge for yourself!

worst movie i ever saw. period. i am not kidding around here. i bought the movie used because i figured a movie with a pig-man on the cover had to be hilariously bad. me and some friends tried watching it but everything about the movie was so terrible we had to turn it off. the acting was poor at best. the characters were morons. (who would have sex with a pig man and expect it to keep a promise of freedom?) the monsters were inconsistent, in one shot it would be covered in slime-garbage and the next it would be dry. i actually had to force myself at a later time to watch the whole thing just to see how bad it was. i actually felt sick after watching this movie which has never before or since happened. this DVD became a thing we would trick people into getting it among me and my friends, i hid it in a big stuffed animal, sewed it back up and gave the stuffed animal to a friend. after awhile he discovered what i had done when i began to hint at it. he tried to get a family member to wrap it up and give it to me for xmas but my brother discovered the plot due to carelessness of my mother so my friend drove past another friends house and threw it on his lawn. it got back to my first friend somehow and he threw it in the trash, right were this movie belongs.