MONKEY SHINES: AN EXPERIMENT IN FEAR
You’ve got to get through a few layers of foam rubber before you reach what’s good (or better than good) about George Romero’s new feature. There’s a series of obstacles–cultural, corporate, ideological, stylistic, aesthetic, commercial–standing in the way of what the movie is doing at its best; they may not count for much in the long run, but it’s better to be forewarned and forearmed.
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Epilogue: A surgical incision is made in Allan’s body, and Ella, the monkey, jumps out of it, screaming. This turns out to be a nightmare–the same sort of bloody trope (in more ways than one) found in Carrie, Dressed to Kill, and a zillion other horror movies since the mid-70s, including the prologue and epilogue of Day of the Dead, Romero’s previous feature. In fact, Allan’s real operation proves to be a success; after being paralyzed from the neck down for most of the movie, he leaves the hospital on a crutch and gets into a car with his sexy new girlfriend, monkey trainer Melanie Parker (Kate McNeil). She cheerfully commands, “Come on, Ace–let’s go fishing,” to music that’s every bit as obnoxious as Shire’s bubble-bath Muzak in the prologue, evoking this time the campy finale to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
In between these soggy slices of bread the Monkey Shines sandwich is packed with meat–an imposing family melodrama full of faces, tension, strong feelings, and personalities, and very little wasted motion, culminating in what is probably the most protracted and successful suspense set piece in any movie this year. What the movie occasionally lacks in slickness it more than makes up in content and intensity–the maverick Romero’s two calling cards ever since his Night of the Living Dead opened 20 years ago.
A secondary theme also bears mentioning: Geoffrey’s antagonistic relationship to the sadistic behaviorist and vivisectionist for whom he works. This had a much greater importance in Romero’s original ending for the film, but how it was integrated with the rest of the story is unclear from the available evidence. A brief account of the original ending in the August issue of Premiere magazine describes a group of antivivisectionists staging a protest rally outside the laboratory; a scientist (apparently the behaviorist) is hit by a rock and threatens to unleash “a whole platoon of killer monkeys” that has been developed inside–apparently accidentally, as a result of Geoffrey’s experiments. It isn’t easy to square this conclusion with the wholly different one of the release version, or to guess at Romero’s original conception, but an earlier debate between Geoffrey and his boss has a lot in common with the scientific debates in Romero’s remarkable and neglected Day of the Dead, and it appears that an allusion to Romero’s Dead trilogy, with monkeys taking the place of zombies, was somehow involved.
The Hollywood figures who seem most relevant to Monkey Shines–apart from the film’s interfering producersare Alfred Hitchcock and the team of producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, all three of whom could be described as masters of repression and sublimation. The use of animals to evoke (as well as provoke) sublimated instincts and repressed “female” emotions is basic to Lewton and Tourneur’s beautiful and chilling Cat People (1942), which asserts much of its power by cleverly sidestepping and discrediting the vulgar Freudian explanations offered by a psychiatrist (Tom Conway), and keeping virtually all its scenes of violence and fantasy offscreen–leading to a poetic suggestiveness that is also present in The Leopard Man, which they made the following year. (A key to the awfulness of Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake of Cat People is its inversion of those very principles–showing and spelling out most of what the original wisely left in the shadows; the vulgar psychiatrist was dropped from the plot only because Schrader as writer-director effectively took his place, showering the story with Freudian explanations to fill in all the elliptical crevices.) While Romero is more explicit than Lewton and Tourneur, he, too, leaves most of the fantasy and violence up to our imaginations, creating a similar zone of instability and uncertainty.
