I Do Movies Badly: Monkey Shines

Monkey Shines starts out as an inspirational tale of a man overcoming adversity with the assistance of a super smart monkey and turns into a horror story of a man trying to overcome the adversity of his super smart monkey. Its problem is it commits to fully to neither.

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2 Responses

  1. FictionIsntReal says:

    It seems sort of out of your usual ballpark to choose obscure rather than representative examples of a director’s work. I watched this one anyway to compare it to other horror films about simians, but I don’t expect I’ll get to the others.

    I agree on how the supernatural angle works much worse here than a film like Phenomena (which I liked more than you did, though it’s certainly not as good as Suspiria).

    I wouldn’t call the nurse a “tyrant”. She’s more indifferent to Allan & her responsibilities, being more concerned with her annoying bird. She’s a completely flat character, but I did think the mom had a few redeeming qualities.

    Allan is shown to be able to move at the beginning of the film, and able to move again at the end. A quadriplegic wouldn’t be able to do all those things.

    Mel is a supporting character rather than a lead. Does that make her poor “representation”? I wouldn’t say she’s an especially interesting character, but I didn’t think she was that poorly written either (at least relative to the overall quality of the film’s writing).

  2. Jim Rohner says:

    Well, we established early on that we were not going to be discussing Romero’s “Living Dead” films, which would unquestionably be the most representative of his work. But he was more than that, so as a film fan and a Living Dead fan, I wanted to see of what else Romero was capable, to see if he was more than just The King of the Zombies.

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