Not what you would expect from an evil monkey movie. And that’s almost a good thing.
The movie stars Jason Beghe as a track runner who in the first 5 minutes of the film gets hit by a truck and becomes a quadriplegic. And we spend the next 20 minutes of the movie tearing him down. He struggles using his new state of the art wheelchair. His overbearing mother won’t give him space to heal. He’s stuck with a nagging nurse. And on top of that, his girlfriend leaves him for the surgeon that saved his life (played by a young Stanley Tucci). All this leads to Beghe trying to commit suicide and failing at even that.
While all this soapish drama is going on, Beghe’s best friend and speed junkie, played by Mad About You’s John Pankow, is experimenting with capuchin monkeys, trying to make them smarter than the average primate. One monkey looks to have promise, Ella. And after Pankow’s boss, played by one of my favorites Stephen Root, tries to railroad the monkey experiments, Pankow gifts the overly intelligent Ella to his quadriplegic friend as a service animal.
Ella the capuchin steals every scene she’s in. She might be, hands down, the best animal actor that I have ever seen. As silly as the plot sometimes gets, her reactions emote so much feeling. But then again, I’m an animal lover. Ella becomes attached to her new owner. She protects him, feeds him, and she even falls in love with him to the point where they share a psychic bond.
As their relationship gets more complicated Ella starts feeling obsessive and jealous, especially after Beghe falls in love with a service animal trainer, a beautiful blonde played by Kate McNeil. Maybe monkey’s weren’t meant to have human emotions. The tension slowly builds, starting with a dead pet parakeet, then a questionable case of arson, and finally with a house full dead bodies. Is Beghe subconsciously controlling Ella, or is Ella protecting what is hers?
The movie is directed by zombie king George A. Romero. Sometimes his movies can be a bit on the nose, where the subtext isn’t hidden too deep below the surface. That’s mostly true with Monkey Shines. But as hammy as a lot of scenes are, Romero is still really good at building up tension and creating setups and payoffs. And I think the good in Monkey Shines outweighs the ridiculous just by a tad. It’s not everyday a movie can make you empathize with a damn dirty ape.
Leave a comment