Monkey Shines - Awesome Movie

This was an awesome movie. It is classified as a horror movie, dark, suspenseful and scary.  It starts off with Jason Beghe exercising in the nude. Excellent start.

This movie was filmed in 1988. I can't believe I had never heard of it. A great recommendation from a Twitter friend.

Jason Beghe plays a law student Allan Mann who gets hit by a car and becomes quadriplegic. He then needs home care. His friend who works with monkeys has been doing experiments - injecting the monkeys with human brain tissues. The friend has one of the monkeys trained to help his quadriplegic friend do day to day activities.

Then things start to go very, very wrong.

While this is a horror movie I couldn't help but be intrigued by the monkey and the way it was trained. Not only for the movie, but to help the quadriplegic. I couldn't help but think people would be running out to get a monkey for their disabled friends. When I watched the movie the second time, yes it was that good, I noticed briefly at the beginning a notice saying The Helping Hands program at Boston University trains Capuchin Monkeys to assist the disabled. The monkeys in this film were trained using many of the basic techniques pioneered by the program and of course no monkeys were harmed during the making of this film. I knew it was just too cool the way the monkeys were trained that there had to be people wanting these monkeys.

The monkeys even clean house. I'm seriously thinking of getting one for myself just for that.

There was something going on about telepathy that I didn't really follow the first time around but other than that an excellent movie.

Also starring in the movie are Joyce Van Patten, Stanley Tucci and Janine Turner.

I give this one four and a half stars. If they would have blown something up, it would have been five stars.


Copyright © 2011 Virtualpatti. All Rights Reserved.