Monkey Shines (1988)

A Stephen King classic that I've never seen before, with very famous cover art. "A Stephen King classic" is almost universally synonymous with "complete and utter garbage." Let's see! It opens with a suspiciously long statement insisting that the monkeys we are about to see are happy, healthy, and unabused. "NO MONKEY WAS HARMED IN ANY WAY," it says, dismissing the reputational harm suffered from starring in a Stephen King flick. But directed by George Romero, not too long after his Creepshow hits, so there's hope.

The intern-quality credits aren't promising, but gratuitous male and female nudity in the opening scene is a nice touch. Dramatically triumphant violins play for our hero's opening morning jog. Our hero gets hit by a car immediately, and the violins fade out. A scalpel slices into his spine, and the violins return, now sad. He's recovering in a hospital, and there's an oboe sneaking in. Ignoring the silly orchestra, the sound mix in this copy is honestly excellent.

Some time later, Allan, our hero, is back home with a mouth-controlled wheelchair and George A. Romero's beard. This was King's wheelchair hero era. Allan's mom lets a parakeet fly around the house, and his girlfriend keeps her distance. In the meantime, we're introduced to his good friend Geoffrey, a suspiciously maybe-mad scientist in a 12 Monkeys lab, talking nonsense to test monkeys, injecting himself with mystery chemicals, and playing with a human brain. Geoffrey doesn't get along with his boss, the most excellent and still-young Stephen Root, whose presence in the film turns out to be inconsequential.

Allan gets a voice-controlled smart home, which works exactly as badly as our modern-day voice-controlled smart homes. Allan's experience with his early Alexa prototype drives him straight to suicide, understandably, but he screws it up. Geoffrey, seeing that his pal is too incompetent to do anything right, schemes to get him a super-smart human-brained experimental lab monkey. The monkey's trainer is into Allan, the monkey is into Allan, and Allan's housekeeper is not into monkeys.

Allan is dramatically attacked by the ill-tempered budgie (!), which tries to peck his eyes out in a ridiculous bout of manufactured suspense. The monkey takes revenge, in what we can only hope is the start of the much-anticipated simian murder spree. The monkey shines with the blood of its enemies, right?

The monkey isn't the only one evolving. Allan starts acting real mean to the housekeeper and his mother. To his credit, they are both awful. Allan also starts hallucinating that he is the monkey, and suddenly I recall that Stephen King wrote this, and when he says a monkey "shines", he means those dumb mind boxes from The Shining. Argh! Angry Allan learns that his doctor was both incompetent and sleeping with his cheating ex-girlfriend, and shines his anger into his little murder monkey for fiery revenge.

Geoffrey starts explaining out loud to us that the mad scientist serum he has created is obviously allowing monkeys to shine into human minds, so he injects himself with it and switches the lights to red mode in the hopes of telepathically reading monkey brains. This kicks off the slow, repetitive monkey chase that transitions us from acceptably decent film to boring slog. All the oboes and timpani in the world can't make up for how long they dance around in the final monkey fight. Allan miraculously recovers partial movement in his hands, uses it to play a love song on the tape deck, and then bites his little monkey to death and whips its floppy corpse about like a terrier.

Allan can walk again, trumpets announce it's a happy ending, he rides off into the sunset with his monkey training girlfriend, and no authority figures ask even one single question about the several murdered humans and dead monkey in his house.