GOING APE!
Chimps are good for science, but in the movies, monkey business has always spelled doom for mankind
AT the movies, a monkey in a laboratory is never a good sign.
That’s not to say the films themselves aren’t watchable, but the plots sure ain’t rosy. You won’t find any “Scientists cure disease with the help of ape test subject” dramas. Usually, it’s more along the lines of “Formerly cute pet chimp destroys mankind.”
Hollywood’s cataclysmic vision butts heads with our present reality, in which news stories about researchers at the University of Oxford expanding vaccine trials to primates elicit cheers and optimism. In film, however, a gorilla and a beaker spell doom — and damn good fun.
Most bonkers of all is the excellent “Planet of the Apes” reboot trilogy. Even the casting is a flight of fancy: James Franco plays a scientist close to curing Alzheimer’s disease. LOL. Too bad his promising concoction in 2011’s
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” both kills large swaths of the population and creates a hairy, newly dominant species. Andy Serkis’ motion-capture performance as Caesar the chimp, in all three films, is one of the decade’s most groundbreaking feats of acting.
Sometimes, monkeys make zombies, like in the 2003 British post-apocalyptic film “28 Days Later.” The disaster is not entirely the furry chimps’ faults, though. Blame the animal-rights activists who break into the University of Cambridge and stupidly free them! Those numbskulls unleash a virus on the world that turns humans into rage-filled living corpses. (Today we have social media for that.)
These days, what’s most striking about director Danny Boyle’s film are its earliest scenes. When Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes from a coma, he discovers a quiet London almost totally free of survivors. The petrified gloom looks eerily similar to the empty streets we’ve been seeing on the news for weeks during the coronavirus lockdown.
Yes, “Monkey Shines,” but monkey also kills. Director George A. Romero (“Night of the Living Dead”) tried out a Stephen King vibe with his 1988 horror film about a quadriplegic’s helper capuchin, who, when injected with human brain tissue, turns into a cold-blooded murderer. The whole effort is unintentionally hilarious, from Stanley Tucci being offed while having sex to a crazed nurse with a pet bird. When the scientist says the experimental brain came from “Jane Doe,” it plays like Igor saying “Abby Normal” in “Young Frankenstein.”
Romero’s film takes a while to get going, and once it does, the monkey named Ella won’t scare you much. When she tosses a hair dryer into a bathtub, sizzling a woman to death, she puts the cute in electrocute.
Speaking of sweet creatures that make us smile, a young Matthew Broderick was riding high from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ” when his “Project X” was released in 1987. It’s the closest thing here to a niceish movie about lab primates, with an adorable, ultra-intelligent chimp named Virgil communicating in sign language. Playing Jimmy, a pilot, Broderick plots to rescue his pal from the evil military.
And then there’s “Outbreak” (1995), which has skyrocketed in viewer interest over the past several weeks, along with another virus movie, “Contagion.” “Outbreak,” about an easily transmissible illness that begins with a monkey at a California pet store, is directed by Wolfgang Petersen, who’s largely been given the boot by critics since 1981’s “Das Boot.” This film most closely resembles our current predicament, which is why I like it the least.