By 1988, George Romero had nothing to prove.
Night of the Living Dead had rewritten the rules of modern horror, Dawn of the Dead became a landmark film that turned the ubiquitous shopping mall into a mausoleum for American consumerism and Day of the Dead was his scathing and nihilistic death knell for the military industrial complex. And through all of it, Romero had maintained complete creative control from his home base in Pittsburgh, far from Hollywood’s reach.
So when Orion Pictures came calling with a seven million dollar budget and studio distribution, they were flush with Oscar wins and box office credibility from Platoon and RoboCop. The producer specifically sought Romero out for his dark sense of humor. For Romero, it was an experiment: could he work within the system without losing himself?
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.
Monkey Shines is based on Michael Stewart’s 1983 novel about a quadriplegic law student, Allan Mann, who receives a helper monkey named Ella as part of an experimental program. What Allan doesn’t know is that Ella has been injected with human brain tissue by his scientist friend Geoffrey, and the two begin forming a psychic bond. Ella starts acting out Allan’s suppressed rage and frustration, the buried hatred for everyone who treats him like furniture with wheels.
It’s the same territory that Romero had been haunting for decades, his monsters are never really the point – they’re holding the broken mirror to society. And Monkey Shines fits this perfectly.
But Orion had notes. Lots of notes. They hated the title, thinking it sounded like a comedy, and tested sixteen alternatives before settling on the clunky subtitle “An Experiment in Fear.” They refused to let Romero hire Henry Mancini for the score. They forced a happy ending onto a story that didn’t need one, then recut the film without his knowledge to add a cheap jump scare after test audiences responded poorly. The marketing campaign featured a cymbal-clashing toy monkey that had nothing to do with the actual film, and included a poem comparing life in a wheelchair to being imprisoned, which brought disability rights protesters to theaters on opening weekend.
And then Orion released it on July 29th, 1988, the same day as Cocktail. It opened against Die Hard, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Coming to America, Big, and a re-release of Bambi.
It never had a chance at cracking the top ten.
None of this was Romero’s fault, and none of it changes what the film actually is: a slow, deliberate, deeply uncomfortable character study that happens to have a murderous primate in it.
Romero eventually returned to independent filmmaking after the disastrous Dark Half post production, and he managed to finally close out his “society is its own worst enemy” Dead Tetralogy on his own reckoning with Land of the Dead in 2005 – a big studio production that fared much better this time around. -Pop
Monkey Shines was released on home video today in 1990, after a July 29, 1988 theatrical release.