Tina Romero – Through the Shattered Lens

When I was growing up in the 80s and early 90s, a lot of people called me a gym rat. My dad was a high school basketball coach by profession, so most of those years you could find me hanging out in the gym practicing basketball, watching basketball, just doing anything I could related to the game. I guess you could also have called me a video store rat, because if I wasn’t at the gym, I wanted to be browsing the inventory of our local video stores looking for that perfect movie to rent and take home. I remember often seeing the VHS box for MONKEY SHINES: An Experiment in Fear on those shelves, but I never had the nerve to rent it. You see, I wasn’t big on horror movies back in those days so a movie might intrigue me, but if it looked kind of scary I’d usually pass. This year’s Horror-Thon has been all about watching horror movies and thrillers for the first time. When I recently saw the title MONKEY SHINES on one of my streaming services, I knew it was finally the right time to check it out!

The film stars Jason Beghe as Allan Mann, a young man who’s hit by a truck while he’s out jogging one morning. This accident leaves him paralyzed from the neck down, and he finds himself having to depend on other people for just about everything. Understandably, he doesn’t handle this new life very well emotionally, even going so far as trying to kill himself. Enter Ella, a cute little monkey trained to assist people with disabilities. At first, Ella is a tremendous help with Allan’s attitude improving as she helps him gain a little independence. But unknown to Allan, Ella has been the subject of experiments involving human brain tissue, and their connection becomes something more than anyone could have anticipated. Soon, when Allan has bad thoughts about someone, something bad happens to them. When Allan gets too close to someone, something bad happens to them. With this, the little monkey who was making Allan’s life so much better begins turning it into a living hell.

MONKEY SHINES was written and directed by George A. Romero. Considering his place in horror history, I was certainly interested in seeing what he had come up with here. I do have to admit though, that I haven’t watched much of his work before. Looking at his filmography, I think I’ve only seen NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, CREEPSHOW, and THE DARK HALF, which I saw at the theater and didn’t even like. But still, the man is a legend, and I knew this would be another good chance to appreciate his work while expanding my own vast film watching history.

One of the things I appreciated about the film is that Romero really takes his time establishing the characters and situation before jumping into the horror elements. Allan seems like a good guy with such a promising future, only to have it all changed so suddenly. We understand why he’s struggling so much, and we’re also happy for him as we see his spirits lifted through Ella, as well as her beautiful trainer Melanie Parker (Kate McNeil).

We get to see how Allan’s accident affects the people that knew him before the accident, like his best friend Geoffrey (John Pankow) and girlfriend Linda (Janine Turner). We also meet the brand new people in his life, like Melanie and his live-in nurse, Maryanne (Christine Forrest). In essence the film has taken its time establishing the people who have treated Allan well, and those who haven’t, which adds to the emotional stakes once the horror finally starts kicking in. It might be fair to criticize Romero for taking too long to get to the action, but for me, a little patience pays off with this one.

I think Jason Beghe does a good job as Allan. His character has a lot of highs and lows throughout the film, and he seems to navigate the emotions well enough that I was still pulling for him, even if he did act like a jerk at times. I don’t watch a lot of TV, but Beghe’s career is still going strong to this day as he plays the lead in the hit series CHICAGO PD. And then there’s Ella, the cute little capuchin monkey played by Boo, who gets an “introducing” credit in the film. I laughed and smiled with Allan as she came into his life and made things so much better at first. One of the more effective things about the movie is the sense of dread that comes from knowing that joy cannot last.

As far as the supporting cast, I think I most appreciated John Pankow’s performance as the best friend. He’s one of those guys who loves his buddy, but he’s morally compromised and has so many self-medicating vices that he ends up screwing up other people’s lives while taking himself down. One of the things I love about watching 80s movies is seeing who pops up in the more minor roles. Here we get Stanley Tucci as a sleazily arrogant doctor and Stephen Root as the cruel head of an animal research lab.

I’d say if the movie does falter, it would be in its ending. Rather than following through on the more grounded, psychological story it had been telling, it seems to push things in a direction that’s pretty far over-the-top. I wanted the ending to feel like a natural progression of everything that had come before, but instead, it felt like the movie was going for more crowd-pleasing theatrics. With that said, it was still very effective when Allan, with all his physical limitations and vulnerability, was truly forced to defend himself. I’ve read that the studio got involved with the ending, interfering with Romero’s original vision, but I can only judge the finished product. It didn’t ruin the film by any stretch, but the change in tone is very noticeable.

My final verdict on MONKEY SHINES is that it’s an effectively dramatic horror film with an interesting premise, a good central performance, and a talented director who knows how to tell a story while building up a sense of dread, even if its ending didn’t land perfectly. Looking back now, I’m glad this video store rat finally took that box off the shelf.

The 1982 film Missing takes place in Chile, shortly after the American-backed military coup that took out that country’s democratically elected President, Salvador Allende.

Of course, the film itself never specifically states this. Instead, it opens with a narrator informing us that the story we’re about to see is true but that some names have been changed “to protect the innocent and the film.” The film takes place in an unnamed in South America, where the military has just taken over the government. Curfew is enforced by soldiers and the sound of gunfire is continually heard in the distance. Throughout the film, dead bodies pile up in the streets. Prisoners are held in the National Stadium, where they are tortured and eventually executed. Women wearing pants are pulled out of crowds and told that, from now on, women will wear skirts. The sky is full of helicopters and, when an earthquake hits, guests in a posh hotel are fired upon when they try to leave. About the only people who seem to be happy about the coup is the collection of brash CIA agents and military men who randomly pop up throughout the film.

Again, the location is never specifically identified as Chile. In fact, except for the picture of Richard Nixon hanging in the American embassy, the film never goes out of its way to point out that the film itself is taking place in the early 70s. If you know history, of course, it’s obviously meant to be Chile after Allende but the film itself is set up to suggest that the story its telling is not limited to one specific place or time.

Charlie Horman (John Shea) is an American who lives in the country with his wife, Beth (Sissy Spacek). Charlie is a writer who occasionally publishes articles in a local left-wing newspaper. In the aftermath of the coup, Charlie is one of the many people who go missing. All that’s known is that he was apparently arrested and then he vanished into the system. The authorities and the American ambassador insist that Charlie probably just got lost in the confusion of the coup and that he’ll turn up any day. Even though thousands have been executed, everyone assumes that Charlie’s status as an American would have kept him safe. As brutal as the new government may be, they surely wouldn’t execute an American….

Or, at least, that’s what Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon) believes. Ed is Charlie’s father, a businessman from New York who simply cannot understand what’s going on. He can’t understand why his son and his daughter-in-law went to South America in the first place. He can’t understand why his government is not doing more to find his son. And, when he eventually arrives in South America himself, Ed cannot understand the violence that he sees all around him.

Working with Beth, Ed investigates what happened to his son. At first, Ed blames Beth for Charlie’s disappearance and Beth can barely hide her annoyance with her conservative father-in-law. But, as their search progresses, Beth and Ed come to understand each other. Beth starts to see that, in his way, Ed is just as determined an idealist as Charlie. And Ed learns that Charlie and Beth had good reason to distrust the American government…

Costa-Gavras is not exactly a subtle director and it would be an understatement to say that Missing is a heavy-handed film. The Embassy staff is so villainous that you’re shocked they don’t all have mustaches to twirl while considering their evil plans. When, in a flashback, Charlie meets a shady American, it’s not enough for the man to be a CIA agent. Instead, he has to be a CIA agent from Texas who heartily laughs after everything he says and who brags on himself in the thickest accent imaginable. When Charlie talks to an American military officer, it’s not enough that the officer is happy about the coup. Instead, he has to start talking about how JFK sold everyone out during the Bay of Pigs.

As the same time, the film’s lack of subtlety also leads to its best moments. When Beth finds herself out after curfew, the city turns into a Hellish landscape of burning books and dead bodies. As Beth huddles in a corner, she watches as a magnificent white horse runs down a dark street, followed by a group of gun-toting soldiers in a jeep. When Ed and Beth explore a morgue, they walk through several rooms of the “identified” dead before they find themselves in a room containing the thousands of unidentified dead. It’s overwhelming and heavy-handed but it’s also crudely effective. While the film itself is a bit too heavy-handed to really be successful, those scenes do capture the horror of living under an authoritarian regime.

(Interestingly, Missing was a part of a mini-genre of films about Americans trapped in right-wing South American dictatorships. While you can’t deny the good intentions of these films, it’s hard not to notice the lack of films about life in Chavez’s Venezuela or the political dissidents who were lobotomized in Castro’s Cuba.)

Missing won the Palme d’Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival (an award that it shared, that year, with the Turkish film Yol) and it also received an Oscar nomination for best picture of the year. (It lost to Gandhi.)