Dis­cov­er the ani­mal­is­tic ter­ror of George A Romero’s first stu­dio movie

By the mid 1980s, George A Romero was at the very top of the genre game. His ​‘Holy Trin­i­ty’ of Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead had between them spawned the mod­ern zom­bie, while rein­vig­o­rat­ing hor­ror with sociopo­lit­i­cal alle­go­ry. Mean­while the state-of-the-nation para­ble of The Cra­zies, the vam­pire-in-the-head creepi­ness of Mar­tin and the EC-aping gris­ly com­e­dy of his anthol­o­gy Creepshow all showed a direc­tor at the fore­front of savvy fea­ture-mak­ing that merged cre­ative inven­tion, intel­lec­tu­al rigour and main­stream appeal.

Romero had also, up to this point, remained stead­fast­ly inde­pen­dent – but when he made Mon­key Shines in 1988 he worked for the first time with a stu­dio pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, Ori­on Pic­tures. The results are some­thing of a hybrid compromise.

In keep­ing with his sur­name, Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) is a spec­i­men of human­i­ty and indeed mas­culin­i­ty at its peak. A buff, sculpt­ed ath­lete as well as a law stu­dent, one morn­ing his neigh­bour­hood run ends in an acci­dent that leaves him quad­ri­pleg­ic, los­ing him his mobil­i­ty, his girl­friend Lin­da (Janine Turn­er), and his per­fect-seem­ing life.

Now wheel­chair-bound and entire­ly depen­dent on the sup­port of his unpro­fes­sion­al doc­tor John Wise­man (Stan­ley Tuc­ci), his grouchy live-in car­er Maryanne (Chris­tine For­rest) and his smoth­er­ing moth­er Dorothy (Joyce Van Pat­ten), Allan is embit­tered, angry and des­per­ate. So his one-time roomie Geof­frey (John Pankow) comes up with an alter­na­tive to Allan’s sui­ci­dal thoughts. A researcher in a uni­ver­si­ty lab­o­ra­to­ry, Geof has been inject­ing human brain tis­sue into capuchin mon­keys, and offers his most suc­cess­ful sub­ject as a ser­vice ani­mal to Allan – with­out telling him about her exper­i­men­tal nature.

At first Ella is the per­fect com­pan­ion for Allan, exe­cut­ing, even antic­i­pat­ing, his every desire – but as Allan grows clos­er to Ella’s train­er Melanie (Kate McNeil), he also notices him­self assim­i­lat­ing to Ella both in his aggres­sive atti­tudes, and in his dreams (where his mind appears to merge with her fugi­tive point of view). With Ella enact­ing Allan’s new­ly enhanced rage against those around him, Allan realis­es that in this evo­lu­tion­ary, inter-species bat­tle of wills, it will be Mann ver­sus monkey.

“That’s what the dev­il is, Geoff, it’s instinct,” says Allan. ​“Ani­mal instinct. It lives in us all. Lives by its own set of laws. Laws of the jun­gle.” Mon­key Shines offers a strange twist on the Jekyll and Hyde mythos, with Ella serv­ing not just as Allan’s arms and legs, but also as the bes­tial id to his human ego. Here, as an inca­pac­i­tat­ed man has his will car­ried out by a simi­an slave that is also vying to become mis­tress, Allan’s inter­nal, psy­cho­log­i­cal strug­gle is expressed in Dar­win­ian terms, with the least fit strug­gling to survive.

Dario Argen­to had pre­vi­ous­ly col­lab­o­rat­ed with Romero on Dawn of the Dead, and recut it for the inter­na­tion­al mar­ket as Zom­bi, so it seems fit­ting that Romero should in turn bor­row some­thing back from his friend, here appro­pri­at­ing the evoca­tive image of a pet pri­mate wield­ing a cut­throat razor from Argento’s 1985 super­nat­ur­al chiller Phe­nom­e­na (Romero and Argen­to would lat­er team up again for the 1990 anthol­o­gy Two Evil Eyes).

Mon­key Shines is per­haps Romero’s best craft­ed film, replac­ing the usu­al scrap­pi­ness of his low-bud­get oeu­vre with some very slick pro­duc­tion design and incred­i­ble ani­mal wran­gling. Some­how, though, some­thing gets lost in Romero’s con­ver­sion to stu­dio film­mak­ing. Ori­on insist­ed that Romero alter the end­ing of Michael Stewart’s 1983 source nov­el to a more upbeat one – and then the stu­dio removed a final twist (avail­able as an extra on this disc) that Romero had added to pre­serve a note of the ambi­gu­i­ty that has always been the director’s trademark.

Ulti­mate­ly, the pay­off feels neutered, and when inter­fer­ing Dean Burbage (Stephen Root) com­plains to his mav­er­ick sci­en­tist Geoff, ​“This pro­gramme has to start show­ing results – the peo­ple who write the cheques are get­ting ner­vous,” you can almost hear in his words the con­cerns of the pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, breath­ing down an inde­pen­dent artist’s neck and med­dling with his work. They got what they want­ed, but in the end the film’s form seems as con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed and con­fused as Allan’s ani­malised iden­ti­ty. As Romero’s work evolved, that for­mer scrap­pi­ness was missed. Still, before its dis­ap­point­ing dénoue­ment, Mon­key Shines is a very tense thriller con­cerned pre­cise­ly with one man’s strug­gle to tame his old­er, wilder instincts.

Mon­key Shines is released by Eure­ka in a dual for­mat Blu-ray and DVD on 8 October.