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The 50 Monkey Films You Should Know About
Notice that this isn’t called The
50 Monkey Films You Must See. This is because some are so bad that I
wouldn’t wish them on anyone.
Notice also that some of the films featured are not monkey films
at all, but merely have misleading titles.
Notice finally, that there aren’t exactly fifty of them, and the
exact total that you arrive at depends on how you count them. But don’t let any
of this put you off.
KING KONG
The daddy, or indeed the grand-daddy, of the monkey film genre.
The image of the enormous King (Kong, not a latter day Elvis) atop the Empire
State Building, batting away biplanes with one hand , screaming maiden in the
other, holding on to the building with yet another, unseen third hand, is one
of the most recognisable in cinema history. An image that has graced countless
bedroom walls, and inspired countless parodies.
The giant gorilla, which dispelled them myth that lions are the
king of the jungle (though not, as you might expect, by patiently explaining
that lions come from the savannah), was the handiwork of Ray Harryhausen, who
would later provide the ground-breaking special effects for films such as Jason and the Argonauts. Realistic
though he may have looked in 1933, our team of theoretical physicists assure us
that an ape of that size would not have been able to stand up without breaking
both legs under it’s own weight. Unless, of course, King Kong was actually from
a planet with an unusually high gravitational field and calcium-rich
atmosphere. But that bit wasn’t in the film, so it can’t be true.
In 1976, someone decided that it was time for the monolithic
monkey to be resurrected, in the shape of a Hollywood remake. It was rubbish.
However it is noteworthy for featuring the screen debut of Jessica Lange, who
would later star in Films such as Tootsie
(1982) and Rob Roy (1995) after this
most inauspicious of starts.
In 1986, someone else (or possibly the same someone, I’m not sure)
decided it would be a good idea to make a sequel to the already ill-advised remake.
For the second time in as many decades, it wasn’t. Once again, though, the
appearance of one actress makes it memorable – this time Linda Hamilton, just
two years on from shooting to fame in The
Terminator.
Earlier, in 1962, King Kong had had been a part of the film that
had provided compelling evidence that Japanese lizard Godzilla was a violent,
socially maladjusted psychopath who would take the advice ‘pick on somebody
your own size’ whenever the opportunity presented itself. The combination of big
monsters and destruction of famous landmarks that was pioneered in King Kong vs. Godzilla would later be re-used in Godzilla
vs. Gigan, Godzilla vs. King Ghidora,
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Godzilla vs. Mothra, Godzilla vs. Megalon, and almost every episode
of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.
Now, in 2003, hairy New Zealander Peter Jackson has once again
decided to remake King Kong, due for release in 2005 sometime. The inconvenient
non-existence of time travel means I am unable to comment on his efforts. But
history is not on his side.
PLANET OF THE
APES
The only serious challenger to King
Kong’s title as the best known monkey film of all time. As the title
implies, it features a whole planet of apes rather than just one really big
one.
Adapted from Les Planete des
Singes (which literally translates as ‘The Planet of Monkeys’, confusingly
enough) by French novelist Pierre Boulle, this 1967 is notable for a number of
reasons. It won an Oscar for Best Make-up before such an award even existed.
There’s that famous ‘twist’ ending, which still doesn’t make a bit of sense
after 35 years. Almost every kids cartoon series ever made has had a ‘Planet of
the [insert animal name here]’ episode, which has ripped off the film with
almost uniformly poor results. There was that episode of The Simpsons which featured the excellent Planet of the Apes
musical. And Charlton Heston once again turned in a dire acting performance,
whilst still convincing the world that he was a thespian of repute. The reality
is, his only good film roles have were Wayne’s
World 2, Bowling for Columbine,
and, at a stretch, The Ten Commandments.
And then, of course,
there’s the vast amount of sequels and spin-offs that it spawned. On the big
screen, the next six years saw the release of Beneath the
Planet of the Apes
(1969), in which Heston returned and he world was destroyed; Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), in which original star
Roddy MacDowell returned, and everyone decamped to modern day California,
seemingly to get around the planet’s destruction in the most convoluted way
possible; Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), which showed how the
apes took over in the first place; and finally Battle for the
Planets of the Apes (1973) which brought the series to a close long after everyone
had lost interest.
A TV series, also starring MacDowell, was made in the 70s and ran
for 13 episodes. It was followed by an even more short-lived animated series.
2001 saw the inevitable big budget remake, bizarrely dubbed a
‘re-imagining’ by director Tim Burton for reasons known only to himself. Mark
Wahlberg took on Heston’s role as the terrible actor who some people
inexplicably think is good with remarkable ease. Though visually striking, and
closer in tone to Boulle’s original source material, it was still a bit
rubbish.
Oh, and since no piece on the Planet of the Apes films would be
complete without saying it somewhere – GET YOUR STINKING PAWS OFF OF ME, YOU
DAMN DIRTY APE! Despite the fact that this is the most memorable quote from the
first film, almost everyone you ask will get the words ‘damn’, ‘dirty’ and
‘stinking’ in the wrong order, many also adding the word ‘filthy’ in the
somewhwere. Hell, I’m not even sure I got it right.
EVERY WHICH WAY
BUT LOOSE / ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN
At no point during Dirty
Harry did you expect to hear Harry Callahan, played by Clint Eastwood, say
something like, “Are you feeling lucky, punk? Oh, and by the way, this is
Clyde, my monkey sidekick." Which makes watching Every Which Way But Loose (1978) for the first time a
uniquely unsettling experience. Like the above quote, it is fundamentally wrong
on some basic level, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Released at what was something of a dark time in Eastwood’s
career, Every Which… was never really
expected to set the box office alight in the way that it did. But the
combination of Hollywood’s most famous tough guy alongside Hollywood’s newest
‘tough orang-utan’ resulted in cinematic arson on an almost unimaginable scale.
Eastwood played the curiously named Philo Beddoe, a travelling
prize-fighter, while Clyde the Orang-utan took on the challenging role of
Clyde, Beddoe’s orang-utan buddy. Much of the humour stemmed from Clyde’s
apparent drinking problem, while Eastwood just looked embarrassed. But that
didn’t stop the release of a sequel…
Any Which Way You
Can (1980) trod
similar ground, only possibly with a different ape stepping into Clyde’s shoes.
Though, to my recall, he didn’t actually wear any. The only difference was the
amount of money it made, which was not enough to warrant a further sequel.
But the story does not quite end there. Jeremy Joe Kronsberg, who
wrote he script for …But Loose,
identified the problem with the sequel and set about remedying it in a film of
his own. He applied the ‘Boulle Formula’ - an idea that forms part of the
theory of Advanced Chimponomics – which states that ‘one monkey = lots of money
=> many monkeys = more than enough money to buy the moon, or something
similarly expensive’.
To this end, he created Going Ape! (1981). The horrendous pun of
the title was the first clue that he had miscalculated somewhere – the fact
that it bombed was the conclusive proof. For the record, the film saw Tony
Danza – who, at the time, was a rather big TV star, sharing the credits with
Danny DeVito in Taxi! – inheriting
his father’s millions, on the sole condition that he looked after his troupe of
orang-utans. Some of the featured ‘monkey business’ was really quite amusing,
but Danza didn’t make another big screen outing for a very long time.
ED
Picture the scene. It is 1996, and you are a rising comic actor.
Despite a regular role on a highly popular US sitcom – which will, in five
years time, pay you enough to buy West Africa every week – you yearn for a
break on the big screen. To this end, you accept the lead role in a
‘light-hearted family comedy’ which has only one good line in the script.
And that line is “Ooh, I’m gonna spank that monkey.”
This is the depressingly true story of Matt LeBlanc, and his role
in Ed, a film so bad that the
following year’s Lost in Space seems
like The Godfather in comparison.
LeBlanc, who appropriately plays a struggling actor in Friends, struggles to act throughout the film’s 90 minute running
time. He plays Jack ‘Deuce’ Cooper, a minor league baseball star. Alongside
him, an anonymous midget in a hairy suit (actually, due to industry rules, it
was two anonymous midgets in hairy
suits) plays Ed Sullivan, the team’s chimpanzee mascot. In a plot that somehow
manages to be both predictable and thoroughly unbelievable, Ed becomes the star
of the team, and then gets kidnapped by some comically inept villains.
Along the way, the chimp drives, cross-dresses, and gets locked in
a refrigerated van full of banana-based ice cream snacks. Matt LeBlanc, on the
other hand, looks thoroughly bewildered, yet undeservedly walks away with the
more enduring career of the two leads.
The film was deservedly critically panned. One online critic even
went as far as summing up the title with a single word. Needless to say, it was
four letters long. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination…
MVP: MOST
VALUABLE PRIMATE
The only thing surprising about Ed’s lukewarm critical reception was that it didn’t stop others
from rehashing the idea. 2000’s MVP told the (fictional, natch) tale
of Jack the chimp, who escaped from an animal experimentation laboratory and
revived the fortunes of a local ice hockey team.
The improbable nature of the plot didn’t stop it from spawning a
straight-to-video sequel the following year. Unfortunately, neither film
featured well-known actors making arses of themselves, but were otherwise quite
harmless fun.
DUNSTON CHECKS IN
An orang-utan, by the name of Dunston, checks in (hence the title)
to a hotel and, well, does ‘hilarious monkey stuff’. You know, like swinging
from chandeliers, dressing up in miniature suits, and generally ambling about
in the endlessly entertaining way that monkeys do. As a result, the plot,
involving a diamond heist and Rupert Everett, just seems to get in the way.
THE APE / THE
CHIMP
While the title may imply a certain degree of similarity, these
two films could not be more different from each other. Well, unless one was the
Polish-language remake of Apocalypse Now
and the other was a period drama about the tangled love life of Monty, the
multi-coloured mongoose.
Allow me to explain that rather bizarre comment further. The Ape (1940)
is a risible b-movie horror starring Boris Karloff, who kills a circus ape and wears
it’s skin so he can harvest human spinal fluid. The Chimp, by way of contrast, is one of
the many classic Laurel and Hardy comedies of the 1940s, featuring a
pistol-wielding gorilla called Ethel.
MIGHTY JOE YOUNG
1949 gorilla flick that ‘aped’ (sorry) King Kong on a number of levels. The titular beast was brought to
life by the Harryhausen effects team, and directed by Ernest Schoedsack, who
had co-directed the 1933 classic.
The plot involved a gorilla, kidnapped in the African jungle and
brought to America to take part in a cabaret act. Unfortunately, said act only
involves being chained up and looking menacing, rather than any sort of
high-kicking action. Anyway, he is driven wild by photographer’s flashbulbs,
and runs amok downtown. This has been the subject of numerous parodies, which
are often wrongly thought to be riffing on King
Kong by people who haven’t seen either film.
Mighty Joe Young was remade in 1998, with
state-of-the-art computer graphics providing a much more realistic gorilla. It
starred Charlize Theron, in the days before she shot to fame in… what the hell
did she shoot to fame in? It certainly wasn’t The Astronaut’s Wife. Being, as it is, a remake, it is very similar
to the original in terms of story, but is aimed at a significantly younger
demographic. The horror elements are played down in favour of some sort of
parable about animal rights. As such, it falls a little flat.
CONGO
A film that should never have been made. One of the far-too-many
Michael Crichton novels that was adapted for the big screen after the
inexplicable success of Jurassic Park,
it’s difficult to see how no-one, at any point during the production of this
1995 film, realised just how terrible it was. Perhaps the imposing height of
the author (he is 6’11”, fact fans) blinded everyone to the fact that a plot
involving diamonds, jungles and lasers, a poorly realised monkey and a cast
consisting of Winston from Ghostbusters
and that bloke from The Rocky Horror
Picture Show was never going to appeal to audiences in the same way that
people being eaten by CG lizards had two years previously.
The monkey of the piece is described as a ‘super-intelligent
gorilla’, but presumably the budget only stretched to the strange-looking
excuse for an orang-utan we see on screen. The whole production smacks of this
sort of thing, making it feel like a half-finished knock-off. At least Jurassic Park looked impressive.
Incidentally (I hesitate to say ‘interestingly’), the film was
released at roughly the same time as the rather excellent wildlife documentary
of the same name was shown on BBC2. Although it was normally obvious which was
being referred to in conversation (for example, ‘that rubbish film Congo’ is a reference to the rubbish
film rather than the series), this still made things a good deal more confusing
than they would have been otherwise.
GORILLAS IN THE
MIST
Undoubtedly, and deservedly, the most critically acclaimed monkey
film in history. Sigourney Weaver won a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar
nomination for her performance as the naturalist Dian Fossey. (In the same year
– 1988 - she also won a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nomination for her
role as Katherine Parker in Working Girl
– another one for the trivia archives).
The film charts Fossey’s life working amongst a community of
gorillas in the African mountains, where they are being hunted to extinction.
As you would expect, the film also features no small amount of mist.
Understandably, the deadly serious subject matter results in significantly
fewer laughs than the average monkey film, but don’t let that put you off.
To this day, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund is an active charity
dedicated to the plight of the hunted apes. A fraction of the proceeds from the
recent DVD special edition of the film are going to the fund. For more
information on this, and an excellent Adam Ant charity song (see the Music
section), go to www.gorillas.org.
BEDTIME FOR BONZO
If you ever wondered what convinced Arnold Schwarzenegger to go
into politics, the answer could lie with this 1951 film. It is widely known
that Arnie sees former president Ronald Reagan as a role model, so presumably
if Reagan had starred in a truly ridiculous film while still retaining
political credibility, then the electorate would quickly forget
Schwarzenegger’s career of prancing around in loin-cloths the moment he took to
the soap box.
Bedtime for Bonzo is that ridiculous Reagan film.
Made towards the end of Reagan’s big screen acting career, the
film is ostensibly about the humorous situations arising from a human family
adopting a baby chimp. However there are also lame attempts at sparking a
nature vs. nurture debate, presumably so the film could be ineffective on as many
levels as possible.
BUDDY
In a similar manner to Bedtime
for Bonzo, this 1997 TV movie tells the (true) story of a baby gorilla
raised as a human child, this time by Rene Russo and Robbie Coltrane. Russo
plays Trudy Lintz, who in the 1920s was famed for owning a sizeable menagerie
of animals, and presumably for being as mad as the proverbial bag of snakes.
Under no circumstances should the film be confused with Buddy Buddy (1981), which is yet another
Lemmon/Matthau collaboration, nor Buddy’s
Song (1990) which starred the ‘One and Only’ Chesney Hawkes as a struggling
musician who can’t act. Most importantly, don’t confuse it with The Buddy System, which somehow ranks as
a low point in even Wil Wheaton’s career.
LINK
When you think of stupid ideas for horror movies about animals, a
few instantly spring to mind. For example, the 1959 ‘classic’ The Killer Shrews. In a similar vein, Kittens from Hell and The Thoroughly Evil Koalas would be
pretty silly. And while chimps could no doubt give you a nasty bite, making a
chimp-based horror movie in the era when PG Tips had catapulted to the top of
the list of the nation’s favourite animals was a bit of a daft idea.
But this is what happened with Link,
a 1986 film with Terence Stamp and Elisabeth Shue. It was terrible.
That said, not all monkey horrors are bad. With a slightly
intelligent plot and a master of the genre at the helm, they can be good. Take
for example George A. Romero’s Monkey Shines. This 1988 chiller looked at the
tale of a wheelchair-bound student whose helper monkey, in addition to the
standard tasks as performed by Mojo on The
Simpsons, also reads minds and murders people. Useful, no?
Anyway, that brings us to what could in some way be construed as the
halfway point in this section. Which seems like as good a time as any to
mention the Other Films That You Should Not Necessarily Know About, But At
Least Be Aware Of The Titles Of. This clumsily-titled diversion covers films
such as Rock and Roll Women Wrestling the Aztec Ape (1962),
Don’t Monkey With the Buzz Saw (1914), Universal Ike Junior Makes a Monkey of Himself (also 1914, something of a
vintage year for stupidly-titled films), and, most amusingly A*P*E: Attacking Primate Monster (1976). The film’s title, a bad
translation from the original Japanese, was changed for Western release –
presumably someone pointed out that ‘monster’ doesn’t begin with e. So, the
sobriquet Attack of the Giant Horny Gorilla. Presumably no-one could stop laughing for long
enough to point out the problem with that
title.
Anyway, back to the films. So far we’ve had 26 – 27 if you include
the Peter Jackson King Kong remake.
But if you’re going to include that, why not also include the as-yet-unmade Tennis Chimpion!, the
heart-warming tale of Ricky the Chimp, who, despite the notable disadvantage of
being a chimp, still manages to be better than most British tennis players. The
film is said to be ‘inspired by actual events’.
TARZAN
Although there were so many Tarzan films made that I could make up
the rest of the 50 in one fell swoop, there are a number of concerns which stop
me from doing so. First and foremost, you deserve better. There are still
plenty of other monkey films to consider. Just as importantly, they aren’t
really monkey films in the strictest sense – the majority of monkey appearances
are incidental, connected to the fact that the films are set in the jungle. But
it is hard to overlook a series whose most important films have all featured
the word ‘ape’ in their titles.
Tarzan of the
Apes (1918) is
the very first film of the series. Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) is the first film to feature Johnny
Weissmuller in the title role. Greystoke: The Legend of
Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) was the only one to feature Michael Flatley turning in a
spirited dancing performance in a hilarious leopardskin loincloth. Probably.
Also, the Disney animated version (1999) features Glenn Close as a
talking gorilla, which has to be worth something.
For the record, Tarzan
was based on a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Those who have donned the famous
loincloth and swung from the famous vines include Herman Brix, Mike Henry,
Gordon Scott, Lex Barker, the brilliantly-named Elmo Lincoln, Jock Mahoney,
Denny Miller, Miles O’Keefe, Casper van Dien, Buster Crabbe, Glenn Morris, Ron
Ely, and the aforementioned legendary Olympic swimmer (note: not legendary
actor) Johnny Weissmuller.
Weissmuller’s other screen credits include the similarly-themed Jungle Jim series of films. This makes
him one of the select band of actors who have portrayed two different
characters on the big screen three or more times apiece… I could warble on
about that subject for hours, but maybe in a different book…
Continuing on a theme, George of the Jungle (1997) has similar levels of
monkey merit to the Tarzan films. Based on a comic strip, and starring Brendan
Fraser as the eponymous hero, it’s essentially a Tarzan parody where the joke
is he keeps swinging into trees. It earns it’s place in this guide by featuring
Monty Python and Fawlty Towers hero John Cleese in a role as a talking gorilla.
Called Ape, appropriately enough.
MONKEY BUSINESS
Anyone who tells you that Going
Ape! Has the most obvious title of any monkey film is wrong on at least
seven counts. As well as being the title for any number (five) of animated
shorts, two popular Hollywood films have shared the title.
In 1931, Groucho, Zeppo, Chico, Harpo and Karl, collectively known
as the Marx Brothers, stowed away on an ocean liner and got into various
gangster-related scrapes. A film of the events was made, and entitled Monkey Business. It featured an
insignificant amount of monkeys, but more than enough cigar-related
wisecracking to keep ‘the fans’ happy.
1952 saw the release of the second high-profile film to share the
title. Despite being advertised as a ‘screwball comedy’ - a phrase guaranteed
to strike fear into the heart of any reviewer who has ever seen an Eddie Murphy
film – Monkey Business no. 2, also
known as Be Your Age, was really
rather good. Basically, a team of scientists testing an anti-ageing formula on
chimps quite literally get a taste of their own medicine, with hilarious
consequences. Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers are among the
non-simian members of the all-star cast.
THE BRIDE AND THE
BEAST
No debate about the worst directors of all time can take place
without one specific name being mentioned. (By which, I don’t mean debates
where everyone sits around citing ‘you know, that guy’ as their choice for its duration. Although that kind of debate
sucks too)
The name I am referring to is, of course, Edward D. Wood Jr. His
directing was so bad that his name will not only feature in every such debate, it
will end the vast majority of them.
1958’s The Bride and the
Beast provides pretty conclusive evidence that he wasn’t much cop as a
screenwriter, either.
It starred Charlotte Austin, in a role that truncated her career,
as a woman who, under hypnotic regression, discovers that she was the Queen of
the Apes in a previous life. She then sets off on safari to discover her monkey
roots.
Although Austin rarely acted again, this was not the first time
she had ‘delighted’ ‘audiences’ alongside an ape of some sort. Four years
earlier she had starred in a marginally better example of the monkey film
genre, though this time playing second (or possibly third) fiddle to Anne
Bancroft. Gorilla at Large (1954) was about a series of
murders committed by a circus employee in a gorilla suit. It was originally
released in 3D, but to watch it now it’s merely a competent thriller where
stuff flies at the screen for no good reason.
Still, Charlotte Austin – we salute you, and your monkey-heavy
career.
MONKEY TROUBLE
Making a family comedy with the stars of Reservoir Dogs and American
Beauty isn’t the most obvious of ideas. But it is a reality, and that
reality goes by the name of Monkey
Trouble (1994). Thora birch stars as a young girl who adopts Harvey
Keitel’s capuchin monkey, little realising that it is a trained jewel thief and
Keitel wants it back. What ensues can once again only be described as
‘hilarious monkey stuff’.
The film is notable for featuring an actual monkey in this largely
ape-dominated field.
MONKEYS, GO HOME!
This film, whose title I have been trying to casually slip into
conversation since I became aware of it’s existence, was the screen swansong of
Maurice Chevalier, made six years before his death in 1972. The plot involved several
chimps being trained to harvest olives in Provence – in the days before this
caused moral outcry – and the ensuing arguments between an American (Dean
Jones) and his French neighbours.
THE MONKEY’S
UNCLE
1964’s The Misadventures of
Merlin Jones was an agreeable enough Disney comedy about an absent-minded
professor, from the team who had created The
Absent-Minded Professor in 1961. However most audiences would agree that it
lacked a certain something. Unable to put a finger on exactly what, Disney
bosses decided that, for the 1965 sequel, the very least they could do was
‘monkey it up a bit’.
As such, a chimp called Stanley was thrown in along with returning
cast members Tommy Kirk, Annette Funicello (who inexplicably dropped her
surname for the sequel) et al. The film was no great inprovement, but at least
that scriptwriters – working under assumed names, possibly due to fears of mob
retaliation – were able to rely on the natural hilarity of chimps for
guaranteed laughs.
A MONKEY’S TALE
Utterly unnecessary Hungarian version of The Jungle Book, which seems to look to Pokémon as a paragon of good animation. Although there are
apes-a-plenty, it is still headache-inducingly terrible. Which reminds me…
THE JUNGLE BOOK
It’s another one of those tricky ‘jungle films’, rather than
strictly a monkey films. But surely no film featuring a simian as memorable as
King Louie could be omitted from this list.
Made way back in 1967, The
Jungle Book is still one of the very best Disney films, with just the right
blend of dazzling animation, memorable songs and orang-utans. Perhaps the most memorable of the tunes was King
Louie’s all singing, all dancing performance of ‘ooh-be-do, I wanna be like
you-hoo-hoo’. (Incidentally, his claim to be the ‘King of the Swingers’ is
contested by Peter Stringfellow’s attorneys in a still-ongoing court case). The
song is so memorable, in fact, that not one person I’ve spoken too can remember
a single line intoned by the King outside of it.
King Louie was the first in a long line of distinguished Disney
monkeys, a torch carried by The Lion King’s
baboon Rafiki, Aladdin’s fez-wearing
monkey Abu, and most recently Tarzan’s
gorilla Kala.
There have been other big-screen versions of Kipling’s tale:
1942’s The Jungle Book, 1994’s Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and
1998’s Mowgli’s Story. However since
these are all live-action, they don’t feature singing orang-utans nearly as
prominently.
In 2003, an attempt was made to interest a new generation of kids
in The Jungle Book. If Disney had
wanted to do that, they could have easily succeeded by re-naming it Da Jungle Book and handing out free air
rifles to all cinemagoers. Instead, they created a sequel so achingly inferior
that everyone involved deserves to burn in hell.
STAR WARS
It may appear to be cheating, but… Chewbacca is basically a ‘space
gorilla’, and it hardly seems worth creating a ‘Space Monkey Films’ section
just to accommodate George Lucas’ high-tech soap opera. I mean, he’s big,
hairy, goes ‘woooargh’ a lot and isn’t an American wrestler, therefore must
merit inclusion here. Who ever heard of a ‘wookie’, anyway? Also,
dialogue-wise, Chewie’s contributions are the high point of the films.
ALSO WORTH
CHECKING OUT
A few more titles which are not strictly monkey films, but have
some key/amusing/redeeming monkey-related scenes.
2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY (1977)
Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic sci-fi
tome gets of to a promising start, with plenty of monkey-esque early humans.
Unfortunately, it rapidly degenerates into The Most Excruciatingly Dull Film Of
All Time, With The Possible Exception Of Metropolis.
SHOWGIRLS (1995)
The scene that features monkey butlers rampaging through a
changing room almost, but not quite, makes this abject turkey worth fast-forwarding
through.
INSTINCT (1999)
Anthony Hopkins stars as a feral, murderous gorilla expert. Cuba
Gooding Jr. co-stars as the actor who recently won an Oscar, but whose creer is
on such a rapid downhill spiral that he will soon be reduced to playing second
fiddle to Skeet Bloody Ulrich in some utter, utter nonsense about ice-cream
vans.
OUTBREAK (1995)
Monkeys feature as deadly disease-carriers, a worthy foil for
Dustin Hoffman at last. Also notable for being one of the elite band of
watchable films with Cuba Gooding Jr. in.
PIRATES OF THE
CARIBBEAN
(2003)
Features an excellent cursed zombie monkey, who appears to have
just finished filming a Herbal Essences Fruit Fusion TV advert.
JAY AND SILENT
BOB STRIKE BACK
(2001)
Despite feature an escaped monkey, it still manages to be Kevin
Smith’s worst film.
And then there’s, y’know, every film ever set in a jungle. But I’m
not listing those.
The rest of the films listed feature no monkeys, despite what appear
to be promises to the contrary. You have been warned.
TWELVE MONKEYS (1995)
Okay, so this does very briefly feature a monkey. But that still
leaves us short-changed by no less than eleven monkeys, and no amount of Bruce
Willis-related time-travel guff can make up for that discrepancy. I was hoping
it’d be an all-chimp remake of courtroom classic Twelve Angry Men, personally.
A MONKEY IN
WINTER (1962)
A French film, based on French author Antoine Blondin’s novel Un Singe en Hiver. At least they got the
season right. As for the whereabouts of monkeys, a Gallic shrug is the only
response offered.
MONKEY GRIP (1983)
Pretentious, dated Australian melodrama. From the monkeyless novel
by Helen Garner.
THE MONKEY’S MASK
(2000)
No monkeys, but otherwise a perfect example of the sort of rubbish
that former Top Gun stars whose
careers have gone nowhere since will make. It’s an erotic thriller starring
Kelly McGillis.
LITTLE RED MONKEY (1955)
The title refers to the codename of a diminutive Russian spy, so
we get a run-of-the-mill spy drama rather than a run-of-the-mill film with
monkeys in it.
B MONKEY (1996)
The title refers to the nickname of a jewel thief, played by
‘thinking man’s porn star’ Asia Argento. No monkeys.
BLUE MONKEY (1996)
Entertaining b-movie, featuring flesh-eating bugs instead of
monkeys.
SPANKING THE
MONKEY (1994)
A controversial film, but for it’s incestuous subject matter
rather than it’s fraudulent title. A cult hit.
THE SIMIAN LINE (2000)
For those who do not know, ‘simian’ is the adjective meaning ‘of
or relating to monkeys’. So it’s
something of a surprise to learn that this all-(minor)-star drama (Harry
Connick Jr., Cindy Crawford, Lynn Redgrave, Samantha Mathis) is about
clairvoyance and stuff.
IRON MONKEY
Cult martial arts hit, which is considerably better than the
similarly-themed Monkey! (see Top 10:
Monkey TV)
Final word in this section goes to Simian Films, the production enterprise set
up by Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley during their time as Hollywood’s premier
couple. The name comes from Hurley’s idea that Grant looks like a monkey.
They’ve been fairly quiet recently, and since their last ‘hit’ was Bedazzled, it stands to reason that
they’ve gone bust.
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