Review of Monkeybone (2001) by That Guy C — 09 Jun 2015

I really wanted to like this film. The trailer showed great special effects, a strange environment, and some pretty creative characters, but sadly, this film can't decide if it wants to be a family film or a raunchy comedy. That's where Monkeybone falls flat.

The story is a cartoonist named Stu Miley (Brendan Frasier) falls into a coma and ends up in a place called "Down Town" where he is a big celebrity there for his dark paintings before he started making cartoons. Well, he sees many of his creations there like a Cyclops or Minotaur and also Monkeybone. Monkeybone is a crude, rude, and annoying monkey most of the time in Down Town, but he helps Stu try and get back to Julie (Stu's girlfriend) and wants to propose to her. However, Monkeybone ends up knocking Stu out and tricks him by going into the real world taking over Stu's body. Monkeybone's whole goal there is to create nightmares with a "nightmare juice" in order to entertain the creatures in Down Town and also get laid....

Henry Selick has made films I love like "Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach". Monkeybone looked a little corny and very strange, but I saw it anyways. All I can say is that this had so much potential, but it squanders it when the film focuses in the real world. I really liked when Stu interacted with Monkeybone in Down Town because maybe the monkey could've grown on me with it's sense of humor. I would rather see more of Stu and the wonderfully claymated Monkeybone rather than Brendan Frasier trying to act weird like a monkey in the real world.

The movie as a whole gets 2 stars from me for its great visuals/effects and ok characters. This movie tries to be a comedy, but I hardly laughed once. The only thing that was mildly funny is when Stu possesses the Organ Donor (Chris Kattan) and runs around all weird and such. I don't know why I chuckled at it, but I did.

The other thing to mention is that this movie feels a bit rushed. It leaves questions that you need answers, but the movie doesn't provide. What is Down Town? Is it a place in Stu's mind? Is it a real place? Who are the other people there? What is the sense of time between the real world and where Stu is? I could go on, but I wont.

I understand how some people could like this film and consider it a guilty pleasure. We all have some guilty pleasure films. I just really hated that Monkeybone, the character the movie is named after, is really cruel. It seems like this director wanted to go after a "Beetlejuice" character, but at least Beetlejuice was a bit hilarious. Monkeybone is hardly shown as a monkey and more as Brendan Frasier acting stupid.

Also, if you plan on showing this to your kids, please don't. There are some very uncomfortable scenes that I still cannot bare to watch. There is one scene where the dog has a nightmare about being neutered by cat-men..... I wish I was making this up, but I am not.

Overall, if you do like seeing amazing visuals and you're a fan of Tim Burton films, you might like this one a bit. The claymation, CGI and costumes are all very well done for the time and still hold up today, but the story is the downfall of this whole film.

If Hollywood ever wants to remake a film, I think they could try to fix Monkeybone if they wanted to. Just a suggestion.