!!WARNING: Contains plot spoilers!!

As the 1980s neared their end, George A. Romero was heading into what would prove to be a dispiriting fallow period. Between Monkey Shines, his adaptation of Michael Stewart’s 1983 novel, in 1988 and the revival of his zombie series with Land of the Dead in 2005, the only directed two and half feature films – a contribution to his Dario Argento collaboration Due occhi diabolici/Two Evil Eyes (1990), the Stephen King adaptation The Dark Half (1993) and the self-scripted Bruiser in 2000. Monkey Shines was his first film for a studio – Orion Pictures – and is a compromised but typically thoughtful film that runs far too long and simply doesn’t resolve satisfactorily.

Athletic law student Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) is left a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic following surgery to heal wounds sustained in a traffic collision. He’s initially left in the less than tender care of domineering mother Dorothy (Joyce Van Patten) and an indifferent nurse Maryanne (Christine Forrest). His pharmaceutical scientist friend Geoffrey Fisher (John Pankow) suggests that he take in a Capuchin monkey as a service animal to help him around the house, but he has a secret agenda – he’s been developing a serum that will boost intelligence and, under pressure to produce results, has injected it into a lab monkey that Mann names Ella (Boo, with the inevitable voice characterisations by Frank Welker). With Melanie Parker (Kate McNeil), a helper monkey trainer on hand, Ella proves to be a great boon to Allan, giving him a much-needed sense of freedom. But as Allan grows short-tempered and resentful, Ella seems to pick up on his mood and she too becomes aggressive. Allan comes to suspect that he now has a telepathic link with the monkey who starts to act out Allan’s violent impulses, starting by killing Maryanne’s budgie but soon graduating to murdering humans that Allan feels have crossed him…

Romero’s screenplay seems to have struggled to condense the complexities of Stewart’s novel, the first half being too slow and dull, the characters largely reduced to stereotypes and the ending failing to neatly tie up all the narrative loose ends. As you’d expect from a director as smart as Romero, the film raises anti-vivisectionist concerns, but they form just one of the many subplots that clutter the script. We get the almost obligatory romance, a mad(ish) scientist, family tensions, and much more that rather distracts away from the film’s most interesting thesis, that human rage can infect the natural world to catastrophic effect.

Ella is very cute, though she’s so tiny that it’s hard to see her as too much of a threat. Indeed, by the end, the morality of the story has become so muddled that rather than rejoice in her inevitable demise, we’re left feeling that she’s been treated very shabbily indeed. She ends up addicted to both Geoffrey’s serum and the violence that she’s been encouraged to commit, and takes the rap for the murders, all of which were really caused by Allan’s uncontrolled anger and bitterness – poor Ella was just the innocent instrument of his revenge but at the end, she’s dead and Allan has got away Scot free having caused, directly or indirectly, the deaths of his doctor, his ex-girlfriend, his scientist buddy and even his own mother. He just swans off with Mel, apparently cured, to live presumably a happy life and pays nothing for his crimes.

In truth, some of this may not have been Romero’s fault. Orion Pictures were in some degree of financial trouble and were desperate for a box office hit and they were unhappy with Romero’s original, more downbeat ending (as in the novel, Allan doesn’t recover from his injuries). They asked him to reshoot the ending, adding the happier closure for Allan and Mel and, after poor preview screenings, the ridiculous “back-burster” nightmare scene. Romero was given the option to go with whichever version he wanted and he opted for a quiet life and agreed to the studio’s cut. He was already dismayed that they’d forced him to scrap almost half of his original script and after this, he never worked directly for a major studio again.

Curiously, Romero seems to be tipping his hat to the work of several other directors, something that he had thus far very much resisted. The subjective camera shots of Ella scampering through the nearby woods recalls similar scenes in John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (1981), Ella wielding a straight razor recalls another monkey/ape hired as an assistant to a wheelchair user, the indomitable Inga in Argento’s Phenomena (1985) and the serum that Geffrey develops is green (albeit non-glowing) just like the reagent in Re-animator (1985) – Pankow even looks, at times, a little like Jeffrey (note the name…) Combs’ Herbert West in Stuart Gordon’s film. Even the internalised rage finding an outlet in physical form recalls David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979). It suggests a certain tiredness and lack of ideas on Romero’s part and his subsequent return, albeit reluctantly, to the zombies that he will be forever associated with, only adds to that suspicion.

But the satirical moments – the critique of Man’s relationship with animals, the greed of pharmaceutical corporations and the nature of toxic masculine rage – are as sharp as ever, only lightly diluted by the stodginess of the narrative. It’s not one for animal lovers – some of the indignities heaped upon Ella, including the ridiculous sight of Allan shaking her to death with his bare teeth are rather upsetting – and for those looking for the gore that Romero had used so much in his zombie films are definitely going to be out of luck. But if you can get past its many moments of silliness, there’s still enough of what we want from a Romero film to be found here – just not enough of them and what there is, is often poorly organised.