MONKEY SHINES (1988)

Monkey Shines was the first feature to put George A. Romero in the director’s seat as a hired hand on a fully-fledged non-independent studio-backed production. Inspired by a pulp novel written by Michael Stewart, it was initially mooted for adaptation by independent producer Peter Grunwald, who proposed it as an investment opportunity for the American entrepreneur and sometime-producer Charles Evans (brother of the Hollywood production legend Robert Evans), with Romero only joining the project after it’d already received substantial backing from Orion Pictures. In spite of studio interference which resulted in the ending having to be radically reshot and altered after a bad preview screening, and despite being required this time to employ a great many outsiders on the crew rather than rely exclusively on his usual close-knit team of Pittsburgh-based collaborators, the film fits neatly into the overall Romero oeuvre, while presaging a certain taming of the anarchic spirit for which his name had hitherto been a byword. 

This being his first film since the anti-military gore-fest that was 1985’s Day of the Dead, the mainstream approach here is particularly noticeable. Even so, Romero was still the primary creative force on the project and was called upon by the producers to write the screenplay as well as direct the feature; so although his version apparently sticks fairly faithfully to the original source novel, it does place more emphasis than the book on a view of human nature that is relatable to the perpetual Jekyll and Hyde struggle many of Romero’s films portray as the key to understanding the social relations governing human interaction. In fact, Monkey Shines, in retrospect, can be considered the first entry in a trilogy of Romero films that feature murderous doppelgangers that take on a destructive physical form that represents the unacceptable or negative aspects of their protagonists’ overstressed psyches.  The Romero touch is still very much evident, then, even if the rough edges had to be somewhat sanded down on what was always going to be a relatively bloodless affair.

As well as the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, the film takes inspiration from certain elements of H.G. Wells's novella The Island of Dr Moreau, especially regarding its handling of the vivisection theme and its portrayal of animal experimentation in the name of scientific discovery – a topic that was also addressed in Day of the Dead in a much more graphically visceral and intense way than it is here. The Victorian short story Green Tea seems to have some degree of relevance as well. This was one of five supernatural tales constituting the 1872 collection In a Glass Darkly, by Sheridan Le Fanu. Ostensibly a story of the uncanny and the supernatural, it also in a veiled way addresses what can be the lonely silent struggle of those who face mental health issues, tackling the theme metaphorically through the story of a devout vicar who starts to see an impish spectral monkey everywhere he goes that is only visible to him and is able to read his mind. It exerts a malign influence at first by interrupting his prayers, until he feels that he can pray no more, and eventually the protagonist comes to believe that the creature communicates through him by actually influencing his actions: "Yes, yes, it is always urging me to crimes – to injure others, or myself!" he tells the sympathetic narrator at one point. The body of the victim who has been experiencing this bizarre manifestation is later found having committed suicide with a cutthroat razor.

A monkey and a cutthroat razor also appear in Monkey Shines, most likely inspired by Romero’s friend, the Italian director Dario Argento, and a scene in his 1985 movie Phenomena featuring a razor-wielding chimpanzee belonging to a disabled entomologist. Arguably, though, the more pertinent of several tableaux Romero builds around the theme for the film features the rogue monkey in question brandishing a hypodermic needle loaded with a lethal dosage, as she ‘experiments’ on her intended victim by holding flaming matches against their skin. This scene forms the crux of the movie’s tense climax, merging its Darwinian take on Jekyll and Hyde with an ironic reversal of the roles of experimenter and experimental subject -- as an incapacitated human observer finds that they are helpless to intervene in the macabre spectacle, much like the small group of anti-vivisectionist campaigners the film depicts protesting in the lot outside a lab where monkeys have been injected with cells from the temporal cortex of the human brain with the aim of increasing their intelligence.

These standard Romero themes concerning the expression of humankind’s essentially animalistic nature, are usually pitched in his films at the societal level. Day of the Dead also explored how institutionalised practices in the sciences can encourage a utilitarian attitude towards other animals that provides the means for us to remain in a state of denial about our own animal natures, a theme that reoccurs here in a domestic context as more a commentary on the fragility of adult masculinity expounded through a story in which a two-way psychic link is inadvertently created between a 

quadriplegic man and the female capuchin monkey trained to be his home help.

 Despite the outré subject matter, Romero mainly tackles it in broadly conventional terms. Cinematographer James A. Contner is primarily known as a TV cameraman and director, and his aesthetic style leads to a mise en scène that is fairly restrained and generic, like a 1970s TV Movie of the Week. Actor Jason Beghe, playing the lead role of Allan Mann, has the clean-cut conventionally handsome looks of a late-twentieth-century daytime American soap star, while the plot is pitched at much the same level, exploring its ideas through the prism of broad-brush melodrama and soap opera intrigues. Where the film particularly excels is in its editing. Romero’s regular editor since Knightriders, Pasquale Buba, does an astonishing job of crafting a believable performance from the facial expressions and actions of Boo the stunt monkey, edited with Tom Savini’s various puppet stand-ins to perfectly capture the illusion that this capuchin is a full participant in the emotional elements as well as in the action side of the narrative. Romero has understandably described Monkey Shines as his most ‘crafted’ film, and its conventional, invisible-too-the-viewer technique is a plus when it comes to persuading its audience to passively accept a feature like that which has had, out of necessity, to be painstakingly constructed from scratch in the edit.  

The film introduces Allan Mann to us as someone to aspire to -- the acme of masculinity -- defined through the physicality of his body. He has it all: good looks, robust athleticism, a gorgeous girlfriend -- and a bright future in Law, ready and waiting for him for when his athletics career eventually comes to an end. But, following in the tradition of tragic melodramas from time immemorial, all of this is taken away from him in an instant after a freak accident renders him paralysed from the neck down. His perfect life falls apart almost instantly: the girlfriend (Janine Turner) runs off with the surgeon (Stanley Tucci) who operated on him, and Mann is forced to rely on technology and a live-in nurse to help him with the basics such as feeding, washing and dressing. Unable to adjust to these reduced circumstances, Mann attempts suicide, and is only saved in the nick of time by his friend, research scientist Geoffrey Fisher (John Pankow), who’s been working on ways of increasing levels of intelligence using capuchin monkeys as test subjects, injecting them with a serum made from human brain cells in experiments conducted at a small lab run by his devious boss (Stephen Root).

Geoffrey has heard about a ‘helping hands’ program created specifically to train up monkeys that help quadriplegics with daily chores around the house. Because there is such huge demand for the service (and it takes time to train a monkey from scratch), he ‘donates’ his own best research subject, Ella, to be taught alongside Allan by trainer Melanie Parker (Kate McNeil); but he lies to her about the nature of the experimental research Ella has previously been exposed to. Romance blossoms between the caring Melanie and Allan, as she spends more and more of her time helping him learn to control and command the versatile Ella; but soon an equally intense and infinitely stranger relationship also develops in parallel between man and beast.

The film becomes an examination of what happens to a man whose identity has been founded on a physical demonstration of his masculinity, who suddenly loses that outlet as an expression of his identity. Caught between an overbearing mother (Joyce Van Patten), who takes charge of bathing him using an embarrassing harness contraption suspended above the bath, and a fussy live-in-nurse (Romero’s ex-wife Christine Forrest, who also cast the film) employed to help administer to his needs but who treats him with the same patronising condescension as she reserves for her pet Budgerigar ‘Bogie’, Allan not only loses the ability to direct his own life but also his pride and his dignity. He finds himself caught in what to him has become a horrifying vice-grip of humiliation and infantilisation perpetuated by the dotting women who preside over this daily emasculating cycle of domestic frustration.

Ella the monkey is, in turn, reviled by these same women who seem unconsciously to see her as a threat to their status as primary carers, especially when Allan begins to form his unusual bond with the creature. Secretly injected on a regular basis by Geoffrey with brain cells taken from a human female, Ella starts to display peculiarly human traits, such as her tendency to respond to music. This is highlighted by her preference for the music of Peggy Lee which she plays on cassette while she works. As the monkey gets more humanlike, so Allan simultaneously becomes more animalistic and prone to savage bursts of spiteful anger directed at the people he feels have humiliated, cuckolded or thwarted him as a man.

This two-way ‘mind-meld’ cross-species identity crisis accentuates the evolutionary connections that already exist between the mind of man and primate. Romero symbolises the union with the image of Ella licking blood from Allan’s bitten lip, as though she were engaging with him in a romantic, distinctly human-like kiss. The psychic connection unleashes the primitive Id in Allan, interpreted in common religious mythology as the ’evil’ born of the fall of Man. Allan’s impotent rage fantasies of revenge duly filter through to Ella’s monkey consciousness and she begins carrying out the hateful acts his subconscious can no longer suppress or control. Allan’s unfaithful ex-wife and her lover are soon the number one targets, but so too are all the other women in his life who now control and dominate him, including his mother. Allan is able to see everything that happens to them through Ella’s eyes but is unable to turn off the flow of hate. 

The turning point of the narrative comes when Allan’s relationship with Ella’s former trainer Melanie becomes sexual, and Ella’s human-like feelings bring forth in her a jealousy that unleashes a veritable orgy of violence and confrontation involving Geoffrey, Melanie and Ella in a fight to the death for full dominance and control.

The film was not received well by audiences at the time of its release, and never really had much of a chance at the box office after being put up against Tom Cruise’s Cocktail. Disability groups were not too pleased with it either. Specifically, they objected to the terrible ad campaign devised by Orion Pictures that led to some theatres in the States being subjected to protests. In truth, there is something slightly iffy about the premise of the movie from the point of view of disability rights: it does rather depend on a common trope in fiction where the villain is given a disability that confines them to a wheelchair simply so as to provide writers with a trite backstory to account for the frustration, dependency and impotence of the character, which must then be compensated for with a tendency to dominate and control through other means, inevitably resulting in criminality and immorality.

But the film is actually attempting to critique the more general issue of how our received ideas about strength and masculinity get rooted in able bodied-ness by society and can impact negatively on our ideas and assumptions regarding how the sexes should relate to each other. But by addressing this theme in the form of an evolutionary Jekyll and Hyde genre story that sources our conception of evil in primitive urges that can only ever be papered over by the civilised norms we create through the workings of our higher-cortex functionality, such ambitions rather tend to get lost in the mix, leaving Romero open to having the subtlety of his original intentions misinterpreted. The film tries hard to appeal to a mainstream horror audience but it also features a protagonist who becomes less and less likeable as it progresses. Things are confused further by a thwarted and, as the film stands, an unnecessary subplot, involving John Pankow’s idealistic, driven, drug-addicted research scientist Geoffrey Fisher and his cynical, business-minded, pro-vivisectionist boss Doctor Burbage (Stephen Root). This was originally intended to pay off with a final scene where it was to be revealed that Burbage had harvested the remaining vials of Fisher’s serum. Both actors deliver enjoyable, high energy performances, but this element of the story fell by the wayside after the studio used negative audience reaction during previews to force Romero to come back and replace the original ending with a Carrie-like final shock for the last reel, which even the director admitted was a lazy rip-off of the ‘chest bursting’ scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien. This re-shoot, incidentally, also resulted in Romero being unavailable to start work on his ‘dream’ project Pet Cemetery, which instead went to Mary Lambert.

Away from the issues and controversies of the time, and with the dust settled on our understanding of his career now that we can see the completed larger canvass on which the late Romero’s relationship with the horror genre was eventually constructed, it’s possible to appreciate Monkey Shines for what it is: a quietly satirical deconstruction of male fragility disguised as a mainstream horror romp. In trying to please everybody, Romero may well have alienated many of the fans whose imagination he first galvanised with the uncompromising gore-drenched vision at the heart of his Dead trilogy ... at least at the time. But nowadays Monkey Shines seems considerably less polarising: a flawed but well-constructed morality play, it often does manage to present large amounts of perversity and borderline surrealism in such an understated manner that you don’t fully appreciate the oddness of it all. It is extremely gratifying to have this film at last presented as a special edition dual-format Blu-ray/DVD release in the UK, with Eureka Entertainment providing all the bells and whistles this entails. There are a whole bunch of extras here, including a new commentary by Travis Crawford, and an older one by George A. Romero -- although Crawford’s ends up seeming rather superfluous and resorts to listing the filmographies of the cast. By the end he’s even listing the entire filmographies of Romero’s contemporaries as well, suggesting that Romero’s informative commentary track and the lengthy retrospective documentary also included on the disc, An Experiment in Fear – The Making of Monkey Shines, had already covered the bases with its discussion of the details of the production as well as coverage of pre- and post-production too. Deleted scenes, behind the scenes footage and the alternative ending nixed by the studio are presented, along with the original EPK materials produced at the time for TV promotional purposes. Finally, trailers and TV spots are included and there’s a limited edition collector’s booklet featuring a new essay by Craig Martin along with archival materials, which rounds off a release that features DTS-HD MA 5.1 and 2.0 audio options, optional English SDH titles, and a 1080p presentation of the film on Blu-ray. The first print run will also include a limited edition O Card slipcase.