Incidents de parcours

It seems that every once and a while, a neat little horror film comes along that eschews genre conventions and is able to tap into a new vein to provide its scares. Writer-director George A. Romero, of "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) and "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) infamy, brings forth "Monkey Shines," an adaptation of the novel by Michael Stewart.

Romero has always been a director who goes for the throat in delivering the shocks in his horror pictures. But in the savage gore and mayhem, he has never lost sight of the human characters, their drama, and their plight. In "Monkey Shines," Romero seems to have been domesticated somewhat - dare I say, "tamed" - in that characters and drama are most essential to the core of the film, and that horror is really the last thing on his mind.

"Monkey Shines" begins with the Good Day Gone Bad, Really Bad: Allan Mann (Jason Beghe), is a highly physical law student who goes for a jog early one morning after spending the night with his girlfriend Linda (Janine Turner). To avoid a dog on the sidewalk, he unknowingly runs into the path of an oncoming truck. He wakes up several weeks later in the hospital, now a quadriplegic, paralyzed, unable to use his body anywhere below the neck.

Confined to a wheelchair he moves around by working a lever with his mouth and having to rely on live-in nurse Maryanne (Christine Forrest), his doting, overbearing mother Dorothy (Joyce Van Patten) and having to deal with his pompous surgeon Dr. Wiseman (Stanley Tucci) who begins having an affair with Linda, Allan gives up and tries to commit suicide. Luckily, Allan's mad-scientist friend Geoffrey (John Pankow) may have a solution: Ella, an extremely intelligent capuchin monkey who is being trained by animal specialist Melanie Parker (Kate McNiel) to be a sort of help-primate for paraplegics and quadriplegics, much like a seeing-eye dog is used for blind people.

At first, a great weight seems lifted off Allan's shoulders; Ella's the perfect helper - she can answer the phone, play cassette tapes in the radio, and even help Allan turn the pages of his books when he reads. She even raises her hand in class for her turn to be called on. A deep bond develops between the two that's right out of any made-for-TV movie about hope and determination to beat the odds. Of course, and this is where the horror elements begin to kick in, what Allan doesn't know is that Ella is really Geoffrey's guinea pig in an experiment to create super-intelligent primates: he's been secretly injecting her with human brain tissue, which explains her super-intelligence in helping to make Allan's life a little bit easier. Even more horrifically, Allan has been having incredibly realistic nightmares in which he has acquired a monkey's-eye view of the world, and Ella is subconsciously acting out his deeply-suppressed anger, frustration, hatred, and rage for those around him. And it soon begins a battle of wits to see who is really controlling who, which also sees if Charles Darwin was really right all those years ago.

"Monkey Shines" develops so nicely during its first hour that it's easy to forget that first and foremost, it's a horror film and not just any horror film, a George A. Romero-directed horror film. Romero shows remarkable restraint in combining both the human story with the horror story, that both elements are given enough screen time to thoroughly develop and not seem so tacked-on to each other. That atmosphere and tension of the film's horror-themed second half is pretty intense, even if things can be forgiven for the haunted house-style climax.

This is easily the best-acted film Romero has ever directed, though obviously it's not his best; that honor goes to "Dawn of the Dead." All of the characters turn in fine and realistic performances, including John Pankow as Allan's drug-addled mad-scientist friend who truly has his friend's best interests at heart, even if they're morally gray in the end. But there is one performer who is highly deserving of much praise, and that is Jason Beghe. Jason Beghe delivers a strong, controlled central performance that in my opinion, was criminally overlooked by a great many awards organizations. His performance is one of the most convincing and sympathetic portrayals of a physically handicapped protagonist I've ever seen in the movies. Essentially a prisoner in his own body, he hits every emotive note perfectly, and we believe and can see where and why his anger and rage at his condition is one of the most believable performances in the history of Romero's long and distinguished career as a filmmaker.

"Monkey Shines" is an overlooked career highlight from a highly distinguished director, George A. Romero. Even more so, Jason Beghe's criminally underrated performance makes the film even more worthy of more significant praise.

This is one horror film that isn't monkeying around in the end. It is really scary.

8/10

This film has been described as a "horror film for people who don't like horror films." That's an apt description for this underrated psychological/supernatural thriller from Pittsburgh's master horror director, George A. Romero. To date, this is Romero's only studio film, and he had to make numerous compromises to the finished product. (The originally intended ending would have been a killer.) That said, the film still comes off as smart and sharp, with some very good casting. (John Pankow, recognizable from "Mad About You," is really excellent here, and there are nice early performances from Stephen Root, Stanley Tucci, and Janine Turner.) And check out the amazingly good editing in the last 10 minutes. Overall, while this is not first-tier Romero, it's a terrific little horror film.

Aah, George A Romero - the master himself - does it again. This is a very stylish thriller and perfect study of how man's apparent progress goes horribly wrong.

The film captured my attention from the opening moment. Jason Beghe is perfectly cast in this demanding role. It was interesting (if somewhat creepy) to see how things started going wrong, very subtle at first, and how the situation declined to absolute chaos and mayhem. The romance interest felt very natural and enjoyable. Quite often the romance feels forced into a film; here it seemed inevitable given the circumstances.

This is a true classic!

This is not your run-of-the-mill slasher film. This is a well developed, well-paced suspense-type horror. If what you like it lots of blood and cheap scares punctuated by incidental music, then you should skip this film. If you like a horror involving a few good characters, and a really talented monkey, then take a look. The tension builds slowly. There are a lot of interesting characters, who are neither "good guys" nor "bad guys" (this includes the killer). The acting is not all that great, but the script is solid. That the monkey may be the best performer in the b=cast says more about the monkey than the human castmembers!

Well, I really can't understand why some people talk so bad about MONKEY SHINES - that's a real good one from Romero! Not only is the idea (the "evil" part of the human soul and behavior is the suppressed animal instinct that sometimes breaks through)in general fascinating - but it is also very well brought on the screen! Romero is often blamed for his unspectacular kind of filming, for his "low aesthetics" (especially his films of the 80ies) etc. but if you look a little deeper, you'll see how much sense his special kind of filming makes, for example as a means to show and develop characters. By the way: the beginning sequence is so great - in a way it shows the "poetry of a car accident" (does this sound perverted?). I appreciate the way of handling the topic of being handicapped - MONKEY SHINES is THE SEA IN ME (2004, directed by A. Amenabar) as a horror movie! The film not only works on a philosophical level but is also - of course it has to because it's a horror movie - very thrilling, even though Tom Savini doesn't go as far with his FX as in his splatter flicks. The only thing I didn't like was that the effect of the serum wasn't explained in a scientific way - this makes the story look like some old-fashioned mad-scientist-story from the early decades of the 20th century... And of course: you'll also find the characteristic Romero-sense for dark humor in this one, too.