Review of Monkey Shines (1988) by Shane V — 24 Dec 2009

After another sleepless night watching the Independent Film Channel, here's my review of "Monkey Shines.".

Allan Mann leads a good life. A house, a girlfriend (apparently a good sex life), & a strong, healthy body. But one day on a morning run, he is accidentally hit by a truck. He wakes up from surgery as a quadriplegic. Meanwhile his friend Geoffrey, a scientist, has been working with monkeys to make them more intelligent. He donates his one successful subject Ella, after being trained by his friend Melanie, to Alan as a kind of helper. Allan soon becomes attached to Ella as well as Melanie. But it seems that Ella may be becoming far too attached to Allan for his own good.

It's an odd plot to be sure, but I'll be darned if it's not interesting. The animal training and the results of it are marvelous. Boo, the monkey playing Ella, almost makes for a real character and becomes the real star of the film. Of course the characters of Allan (Jason Beghe), Geoffrey (John Pankow) & Melanie (Kate McNeil) all do well enough to be believable and perhaps even a bit engaging. The story seems to start straight from the get-go, but spends far too much time getting to the actual plot. And then from there the plot takes a bit too long to really heat up, even if it serves to mount the tension. The writing isn't the best, but it isn't too cheesy either. Overall it's a nice little creeper flick with few concepts mixed in, such as the wrongness of animal testing, & the different relationships & evils of men and women. A simple movie that turned out to be better than I expected. It probably wasn't as good as the book, and the title makes no sense to me, but nonetheless, I give "Monkey Shines" 6.5 'bottles of beer on the wall' out of 10.

AFTERTHOUGHT: THIS IS NOT OFFICIALLY PART OF THE REVIEW. This is just an interesting little bit I picked up from the movie. It does show the evils of men and women in this movie, but in my opinion focuses a bit more toward the evils of women, (or rather the female gender) and perhaps came of slightly offensive. Whether it was intentional or not I do not know, but that's just what I picked up. Is it just me, or did anyone else catch that?