Monkey Shines (1988)
Some films arrive with a completely unexpected key that unlocks them. I pressed play on Monkey Shines expecting a reasonably straightforward 80s horror thriller, and about twenty minutes in, I had one of those bizarre pop-culture lightbulb moments that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. This is the exact film that inspired that classic Malcolm in the Middle episode where Craig ends up in a wheelchair with a helper monkey and becomes utterly convinced the creature is conspiring against him. I had absolutely no idea before sitting down with it, but that realisation completely reframed the whole experience. Suddenly I was watching something that had quietly embedded itself in the cultural fabric without ever getting the credit for it.
What makes that all the more interesting is who made it. George A. Romero, the undisputed king of the zombie genre, the man behind Day of the Dead, pivoting away from the undead to deliver a quirky, creeping psychological thriller far more concerned with the mind than the macabre. It is not the obvious career move, and honestly, that is a big part of why it works as well as it does.
The premise is deceptively simple and genuinely unsettling in the right hands. A quadriplegic man, played with real commitment by Jason Beghe, is given a trained capuchin monkey named Ella to assist him with daily life. The creature is smart, devoted and, gradually, dangerously possessive. What Romero does with that setup is where it gets interesting. He uses the bizarre human-animal bond to dig into something much heavier: the sudden, devastating loss of bodily autonomy, the quiet indignities of relying on others, the way well-meaning people around a disabled person can project their own anxieties and assumptions onto him. The monkey is the horror, yes, but the horror is also the situation itself. That is pure Romero. Beneath the lunatic primate, there is sharp social commentary doing real work.
I do have to be honest about the pacing, though. If you come to this expecting the propulsive, gory spectacle of Dawn of the Dead, you are going to be thoroughly disappointed. Monkey Shines is slow. Deliberately, almost stubbornly slow. The dread creeps in at the edges rather than bursting through the door, and the film asks you to spend a lot of time in the quiet, claustrophobic world of Beghe's bedroom, sitting with his frustration and fear before anything truly horrifying kicks off. That approach suits the themes beautifully, but I will not pretend it makes for easy viewing. There are stretches that test your patience, and the tonal balance between psychological study and B-movie chiller is not always clean. It wobbles.
Beghe holds it together, though. It is a physically demanding and emotionally exposed performance, and he never lets you forget the specific, grounded reality of his character's circumstances even when the film around him gets strange. Romero clearly trusts him, and that trust pays off.
Three stars. Monkey Shines is a decent, uneven, genuinely fascinating oddity from a director who had more range than he is usually given credit for. It is not a film that will satisfy everyone, and I suspect the people who bounce off it will do so pretty early. But if you can settle into its rhythm, there is something genuinely thoughtful going on underneath the absurdist surface. A helper monkey as a vessel for exploring dependency, resentment and the loss of self. Only Romero would think to go there, and only Romero would mostly pull it off.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1988 | Watched: 2026-07-28
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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