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JPJ wrote:

TechNoir wrote:I am a little confused. What does Devo have to do with this?

I'm not a Devo expert but their first album was called Q:Are we not men?A:We are Devo!.Also The Cramps were influenced by this film,their 1981 album Psychedelic jungle has a track called The natives are restless.

Mark Mothersbaugh wrote:The chorus that keeps repeating the "Are we not men" is directly from the very first Island Of Lost Souls (1932). There were 2 remakes that were both tepid and not nearly as compelling as the original. The original had a mad scientist on a deserted Pacific Island where he operated on animals - beasts from the jungle, in a room called the House Of Pain. He operates on these beasts to try to raise them up on the evolutionary chart. It's a very painful operation and when he does this, you can hear them screaming in the middle of the night in the House Of Pain. His biggest success was a female named Lota who used to be a panther, but these animals keep devolving backwards. Lota gets cat claws, and she knows she's devolving. He has to do a painful operation to bring her back again, but in the meantime you see all these characters that are like sub-human, half-animal, half-man creatures that stumble around the jungle. Some of them could hold menial jobs at the House Of Pain. At one point, they were walking in a line around a fire in the woods at night while the doctor's working in the House Of Pain, and they were casting shadows on the side of the House Of Pain, and I saw these shadows of these sub-human creatures just slouching past the wall, and I was like, 'Holy crap, I know all those people, they live here in Akron with me.' That's where the inspiration came from. The mad scientist would crack a whip standing on a rock and all the animals would come to attention, and he'd go, 'What is the law?' Usually it meant one of them had broken the law, like bad dogs that aren't house trained yet. They would all go in kind of a humble fashion, 'Not to spill blood.' Then he would go 'Are we not men?' and he'd crack the whip again and then he goes, 'What is the law?' and they'd have another law they'd have to repeat like 'Not to eat flesh' or 'Not to walk on all fours.' Then he'd crack the whip again and go 'Are we not men?' So that's where the line came from. There were like, watered down, wussy versions of it in the later Islands Of Dr. Moreau stuff, but that was a really intense movie.

Jeff wrote:

Jonathan S wrote:I'm curious why Beaver thinks the 1932 Island of Lost Souls is "presumably... in the public domain."

I couldn't figure out why that would be presumed either. It's absolutely owned by Universal.

I'm not a Devo expert but their first album was called Q:Are we not men?A:We are Devo!.Also The Cramps were influenced by this film,their 1981 album Psychedelic jungle has a track called The natives are restless.

ptatler wrote:empirically good

Jack Phillips wrote:Perhaps it was because, the day before, I saw a real corker of film, also from 1932, Afraid to Talk.

SamLowry wrote:

I'm not a Devo expert but their first album was called Q:Are we not men?A:We are Devo!.Also The Cramps were influenced by this film,their 1981 album Psychedelic jungle has a track called The natives are restless.

All this talk of Devo, Oingo Boingo & The Cramps, but no mention of Blondie? The horror...

manicsounds wrote:Landis, like Leonard Maltin, cannot stop moving his head around while talking. (just watch every Maltin interview, when he stops talking, his head stops moving)

Just finished the disc, except for the commentary. Excellent and varying selection of extras.