MONKEY SHINES
A film review by Shane R. Burridge
Copyright 1996 Shane R. Burridge
(1988) 113m.
George A. Romero wrote and directed this adaptation of Michael Stewart's novel at a time when the renewed 'horror wave' of the 80's was in its ebb. It has an interesting hook: a quadriplegic, Allan (Jason Beghe) is assigned a trained capuchin monkey by the name of Ella to help him with simple routines that he is now incapable of. Ella, however, is the star pupil of a dubious laboratory experiment by Geoffrey (John Pankow), one of Allan's friends. By the finale, we're left with a dangerous situation: after years of evolution, who has the upper hand - an intelligent, angry monkey, or an intelligent, incapacitated human? Romero must have enjoyed choreographing this final sequence - it was pretty creepy when I saw it the first time in a cinema. Film doesn't hold up as well in repeat viewings, but to be fair, this is true of most horror films. There are shocks (mostly of the leaping-monkey variety) and deaths, which are surprisingly bloodless. Its safe to guess that after the excess of his zombie films, Romero wanted to prove he could make a horror picture without gore.
The addition of a science-fiction element (Geoffrey has injected Ella with a telepathy-inducing serum), which provides a kind of mind-meld between man and monkey, is awkwardly posed to justify Ella's behavior. While it's reasonable to expect Ella to feel anger over incidents in which Allan is mistreated, it's another thing to accept her jealousy over his new girlfriend (Kate McNeil). But if you can believe a car getting jealous over its owner's girlfriend, as in 1983's CHRISTINE, then a monkey shouldn't be too much of a stretch. Story could have done more with the notion that the evolutionary gap is narrower than we would care to think, but instead only hints that Ella/Allan are two sides of the same coin, and while their roles never completely reverse, it comes close. The newly-paralyzed Allan (whose surname is Mann) comes to realize that he must not only rediscover his worth as an individual but also his status as a man. And Ella is a worthy adversary - it's chilling seeing her hiss and hyperventilate as her intelligent eyes fix upon Allan's face. The cards are stacked against her, however - we know from the outset that she is the villain of the piece, so have no inclination to enjoy her cute antics in the earlier moments of the film. At least she doesn't ham it up as much as Allan's nurse and mother, who give nagging, one-note performances, just to provide Ella with a couple of targets and ensure, in the eyes of the audience, that they 'deserve' what's coming to them. Romero juggles disparate elements and takes some risks (a sex scene, in which Allan can move only his head, is either erotic or laughable, depending on your point of view), but one gets the feeling that he'd be more at home with a couple of shotguns and a bucket of viscera. Still, as a pint-sized flipside to King Kong, Ella has her place among movie monsters. I've often wondered if the title MONKEY SHINES was a jokey reference to Stephen King's term for telepathy, THE SHINING.
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