Monkey Shines (1988)

Monkey Shines (1988)

Directed by: George A. Romero

Starring: Jason Beghe, John Pankow, Kate McNeil

Judging from the poster and the fact that this movie is directed by George A. Romero of Night of the Living Dead fame, you might think that this is a goofy movie about a monkey that stabs people or something. I know I sure did.

Surprisingly enough, that’s not even close. An Olympic athelete (Beghe) gets into an unfortunate car accident while running one day and becomes paralyzed from the neck down. His wife leaves him and the nurse who’s supposed to be taking care of him is a bitch who doesn’t really care. Luckily (kinda), he has a friend who works in a lab where they do tests on monkeys, and he gets a specially trained monkey to help him do the things that he normally can’t do himself.

The bond between the monkey and the man grows, until suddenly the monkey starts sabotaging his relationship with other people, hanging up the phone on them and things like that. The monkey stops listening to the man, instead taking care of him as she sees fit. It becomes a weird sort of Misery, only with a cute monkey instead of Kathy Bates.

I was surprised at how this movie actually captured a pretty good feeling of suspense and tension toward the end. Romero’s primarily known for his zombie movies, and although the original Night of the Living Dead was nothing but suspense (which is what made it actually halfway scary), it seems like everything else he’s done has just been an experiment in gore. Certainly not so for Monkey Shines (a bad pun name for a suspenseful horror movie? Sigh…).

Sure, it wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, and it wasn’t really scary… In fact, the monkey was just so adorable, even when it was trying to poke out a lady’s eye with a syringe, it was hard to be afraid of it. I guess if I get attacked by monkeys, my last words’ll be, “aww, I bet they just want a hug!” and then stab stab stab stab, and that’ll be it. Anyway, despite a few flaws, the movie mostly surprised me how it actually kept my attention. I mean, it’s a horror movie, after all. Nowadays the pattern is so ingrained into film, deviating ever so slightly from the master plan is thought of as a major improvement.

So yeah, this is actually a kind of creepy movie, moreso if you don’t actually think monkeys are awesome.