Monkey Shines

by Pa Rock
Film Reviewer

My first thought when the title Monkey Shines came up on the television screen was that this must be some Marx Brothers movie that had escaped my notice. Nope. Turns out this is a classy little horror picture starring an eerily talented monkey.

George A. Romero, the screenplay writer and director of Monkey Shines, has a long history in the horror and psychological thriller film genre. Some of the cinematic works that bear his unique stamp include The Crazies, Creepshow, Tales from the Darkside, Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, and Dawn of the Dead - and dozens more - you get the idea, this is one seriously dark dude!

Monkey Shines is vintage 1988. It focuses on a young, healthy male law student (Jason Beghe) who crawls out of bed one morning, leaving his beautiful girlfriend (Janine Turner) snoozing while he goes off for his morning run. Unfortunately, he is hit by a car while running and wakes up later in a hospital as a quadriplegic. The girlfriend promptly leaves him for his doctor, and his needy mother takes over his care - some of which is entrusted to a slovenly and evil nurse. The young man seemingly does not have a life worth living.

But things appear to get better when the quadriplegic's best friend (John Pankow), a young and somewhat warped scientist working with monkeys in a college laboratory, gives him a lab monkey named Ella. The friend has farmed Ella out to be trained by a beautiful researcher (Kate McNeil) who just happens to specialize in training monkeys to work with quadriplegics. What the friend fails to tell the trainer or the patient is that he has been injecting Ella with a serum that he has concocted from human brain tissue.

The patient and Ella fall in love, almost literally and physically, and he soon begins to have dreams that indicate that their minds may be melding. When the patient becomes angry with anyone, Ella takes over - often with fatal results.

That's enough plot. Just take my word for it - this little movie is a gem, and deeply disturbing. I'm definitely not a fan of horror flicks, but I was transfixed by this Romero effort. Ella, whose real name is Boo, was the star of the movie in every sense of the word - and she owned every scene that she was in. Monkeys have come a long way since Reagan's Bonzo or Ellie Mae's chimp, and this one is the Glenn Close of her species!