MONKEY SHINES

(vt Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Terror)

   Film (1988). Orion/Charles Evans. Dir George ROMERO, starring Jason Beghe, John Pankow, Kate McNeil, Joyce Van Patten. Screenplay Romero, based on Monkey Shines (1983) by Michael STEWART. 113 mins. Colour.

   The sf element in this horror thriller is Ella, a monkey, the subject of an experiment to increase simian intelligence by injecting human genetic material into her brain. Ella is given as a therapeutic companion to quadriplegic Allan, with whom she develops a quasitelepathic link. His exasperation at his helplessness is translated by Ella into instructions to kill anyone (including his suffocating mother) who angers him. She also becomes jealous, attacking the two people closest to Allan: his best friend and his new lover. Allan must stop her, using (literally) only his head. Put baldly this sounds trite, but MS is close to perfect in its own apparently unpromising terms. It is made with great patience and subtlety, with an astonishingperformance from the monkey - whose growing intelligence (and malice) is rendered utterly believable - and with Beghe brilliant in the difficult quadriplegic role. The subtext (a Jekyll-and-Hyde theme with Ella being Allan's vicariously controlled Hyde, representing the animal instinctsstill functioning within the human mind) is maintained even in the one gratuitous shock added to the finale after previews in order to make the film less sedate: a metaphoric twist on the old phrase "a monkey on my back".

   PN