#Monkey Shines

[pierppasolini]

Monkey Shines (1988) // dir. George A. Romero

[fanofspooky]

George A Romero horror movies

[petercushings]

It's unnatural, you and that monkey.

MONKEY SHINES (1988) dir. George A. Romero

[soupy-sez]

MONKEY SHINES (1988) dir. George A. Romero

[funswp]

Not my photo. That is one unlucky guy…..

[periodically80s]

[cinemajunkie70]

The happiest of birthdays in the afterlife to George A. Romero!

[delcat177]

What I know at this moment about Columbo:

Columbo is a show about the world's most autistic detective (like actual detail obsessed autistic detective, not "look he do nunbies maths" "autistic detective") reaching the conclusion before everyone else about who did a crime action.

Once he finds the crimesters, he very gently and slowly suggests to the crimester about how maybe, theoretically, possibly, the case could be solved by someone in the room right now, who is NOT the crimester. He does this because he dreads confrontation and wants the crimester to REALLY UNDERSTAND that about that CRIME the CRIMESTER, MAYBE SOMEONE will DO AN ARREST at them, IMAGINE THAT.

Doing an offensive job inoffensively is Peter Falk's Conceit of Character.

I think he hates social interaction. He likes witnesses like House likes clinic duty, UNLESS they are the crimester, which is his hyperfocus. Because, like, astonishingly, this "You did a bad thing and I'm going to tell" continues across the *entire episode* without the criminal getting the hint.

I just watched a *full hour* of a detective going "Huh, it would be a shame if someone had very specific evidence to convict you of that murder, like maybe I have that evidence already, maybe you should leave the country, MAYBE" and the murderer going

...except Columbo doesn't lose his cool, he just goes "Okay then" and leaves, and then a few scenes later comes back to go "BY THE WAY, FURTHER DAMNING EVIDENCE, THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW"...

And for the record, it's fucking delightful.

I don't know how I feel about the Falk Maneuver. On the one hand, it's the closest we've seen to police by consent in this country. On the other hand, a dude winds up dead. On the other other hand, that's way fewer dudes than regular police.

At any rate, it is an apparent truth that there's a monkey in this show, and this is a public apology for absolutely not believing my sister on that front, like, remotely. I pay my monkey tax in Monkeyshines, as per general agreement.

Forget not the holy scrip:

Once there was a man whose prison was a chair

The man he had a monkey, they made the strangest pair

The monkey ruled the man, it climbed inside his head

And now as fate would have it, one of them is dead

1st Monkeyshines: An Experiment In Fear 19:88

Watch Monkeyshines, watch Columbo, and most of all, watch the skies

Goodnight, Night Vape, goodnight

Welcome to Night Vape was in the running for series names for what we now know of The Midnight Gospel, but they were afraid of running into legal trouble.

[skullcrusher-mountainn]

what are they watching

[gorewound]

What's your favourite Not-zombie movie directed by George Romero?

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/11/2022: MONKEY SHINES

MONKEY SHINES drives me crazy for the sole, stupid reason that for much of my life, I have been walking the earth assuming that it is a Stephen King adaptation. This is absolutely not true. I'm sure I just think this because of George Romero's frequent collaboration with King, and because its famous poster so has the bold, exaggerated look of pulp horror covers from the 1980s. MONKEY SHINES is adapted from a novel by British author Michael Stewart, but the screenplay is by Romero himself. It is entirely possible that by 1988, a lot of King's style and approach may have rubbed off on the director, so maybe I'm not completely crazy for harboring this delusion: it's got psychic powers, a domestic animal that goes berserk, and small town drama overlayed with outrageous sci-fi and horror elements. But still, it bugs me that I thought this. I should know better!

MONKEY SHINES is a deeply weird movie that passes for normal due its above-par production value, fine performances, name brand actors, and naturalistic dialog. Perhaps also in the heyday of writers like King and Michael Crichton, this wacky sci-fi thriller, about a paraplegic who forms a corrupting psychic link with his helper monkey, didn't seem so unusual. But inside of this mainstream thriller is a freaky psychodrama with which Freud would have had a field day.

A Capuchin helper monkey named Ella enters the life of law student Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) when an accident renders him paralyzed from the neck down. His days are brightened by Ella's surprising competence and seemingly personal affection for Allan—and by the arrival of her trainer Melanie (Kate McNeil), who also develops personal feelings for Allan. However, the deeper Ella and Allan's bond grows, the more Allan is given over to emotion, struggling to control his escalating rage. Eventually it comes out that Ella is a test subject for an experimental drug, and as the resulting mind meld with Allan makes him more animal than man, it also enables Ella to act out Allan's wrathful impulses.

Somehow the monkey part of the movie isn't as bizarre as the interpersonal drama. When Allan becomes paralyzed, his whole existence turns into a power struggle with the women in his life. His plight begins when he is cuckolded by his own surgeon, and without his girlfriend around to help out, his mother Dorothy (Joyce Van Patten) forces her way into the house. Dorothy forms a sort of infantilizing tag team with the pious Nurse Maryanne (Christine Forrest, Romero's then-wife and frequent collaborator), from whom Melanie and Ella have to defend Allan. Where Maryanne is a castrating school marm type, Dorothy is inappropriately intimate with her son, insisting on bathing him and trying to drive out his new girlfriend. Melanie is mainly worried about Allan's increasing loss of civility…and also, perhaps, about Ella's increasing possessiveness. The monkey is firmly the other woman. There are male antagonists in the film—ambitious, inhumane scientists played by Stanley Tucci and Stephen Root—but they tend to take a back seat to Allan's conflicts with women. From his wheelchair-bound position, Allan needs to literally grow up, wresting power back from his nurse, putting his mother in her place, and choosing a mature relationship over the regressive, obsessive affair with the monkey.

MONKEY SHINES may look like a regular mainstream movie of the period, but with all that going on, it has more in common with a neurotic exploitation movie like THE BABY, or SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS, or BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER. This may not be the sort of place where you normally expect to find a bunch of psychoanalytic rumination, but it's sure in there, and it's part of what makes MONKEY SHINES so surprising. That, and the fact that it's not a Stephen King movie.

But, there is one more thing about MONKEY SHINES the surprised me, personally. When I first started dating my husband some eleven years ago, we hit it off immediately, but we seemed like a pretty unlikely pair. I was (am) an inverted little horror ghoul, and he was almost aggressively normal: a friendly, handsome data specialist who liked beer, bikes, and coffee, and whose cultural tastes skewed just a little indie. I wasn't sure what I could have to offer such a person, but on our third date, he made an effort to reach across the aisle by informing me that when he was a kid, his mother's therapist was the former owner of one of the monkeys in MONKEY SHINES. We don't know if it was the star, Boo, or one of the lab extras (probably the latter), but this therapist had a framed lobby card mounted on his waiting room wall featuring the movie's shocking key art. My husband used to have to stare at it while he was waiting for his mother's appointment to end, and when he finally asked about it, he learned that the doctor used to have one of the movie's animal performers. When my then-new boyfriend told me this, I nearly fell out of my chair, and we've been laughing about it ever since.

[pierppasolini]

Monkey Shines (1988) // dir. George A. Romero

[comedybingbong]

oh i’m being hung? got it

[petercushings]

What's her name? She's a Capuchin, fancy name for the breed Cebus Apella. I've been calling her 'Ella' for short.

ELLA in MONKEY SHINES (1988) dir. George A. Romero

[horrororman]

Notable #horror and #scifi films that were released on July 29th...

#TheTingler (1959).

#CastleofBlood (1964)(Los Angeles, California).

#FrankensteinsBloodyTerror (1968)(Spain).

#MonkeyShines (1988).

#Zombi3 (1988)(Italy).

#CherryFalls (2000)(München Fantasy Filmfest)(premiere).

#Signs (2002)(NYC, NY)(premiere).