WEEK TWO (Oct 5): MEDICAL ISSUES
There's a chance that George Romero could have stopped making films right after
Night of the Living Dead, and still would have inspired dozens, if not hundreds, of filmmakers to follow in his footsteps.
Night of the Living Dead was a true watershed moment for horror films, which is no easy feat for a film from 1968 to claim with competition as fierce as
Rosemary's Baby in the mix. Romero would, thankfully, go on to have a varied career after it, but it's difficult to imagine what that career would have been like if it hadn't started with the cinematic equivalent of an atomic bomb. Would he have embarked on one of the most varied filmographies of a horror director? Would he have gotten the cred to befriend the likes of Dario Argento and Stephen King? Would he even have tried his hands at zombie films? Does he resist the urge to make a studio film for as long he wound up going for? All intriguing hypothetical questions, but if any of these meant not getting the likes of his Dead sequels,
Martin,
Creepshow, and surely others, then it's good that they never got answered.
But for someone of Romero's stature, Hollywood would long knock on that door for as long as it would take, and he would finally answer after 20 years with
Monkey Shines. The material is right up Romero's alley: when Allan, a successful law student, is rendered a quadriplegic in an accident, his life is turned upside down and inside out until his friend gifts him a helpful Capuchin monkey named Ella to assist him, not telling him that Ella has been experimented on with a new drug to increase its intelligence, resulting in a strange bond between the two where his growing, harmful will is carried out by his new friend with exceedingly brutal results.
So why is it a merely a decent-to-good film? As I read up on the history of the production, Romero appeared to have gotten his film practically taken away from him after shooting it, resulting in edits he did not approve of, and an ending I'll take to task soon enough. But assuming that the people who wanted to get in the George Romero business wanted a real George Romero film, I feel confident in saying that it wouldn't have been tremendously better. George Romero is a super solid director; perhaps not the most visually keen one, but someone who knows what they're doing and is able to put together scenes quite well. George Romero has never been a particularly good writer, despite having a lot of great ideas, and
Monkey Shines amplifies a lot of the problems he tends to have with more rigid structures. In films like
Dawn of the Dead and
Martin, there's a sprawl to the storytelling that doesn't feel bound by having a pressing need to get from point A to point B, which gives them a very engrossing feel that they would have otherwise. When he's tasked with a standard three-act structure, he runs into problems of keeping everything concise and consistent, no doubt because of his tendency to have more freeform narratives, which results in a lot of sloppy details.
Monkey Shines feels particularly egregious in this regard, as characters get introduced only to get forgotten or dumped somewhat unceremoniously as Romero can't think of anything for them to do but to just go away, and mechanics related to how the "science" of how the bond between Allan and Ella works remains frustratingly cloudy, especially when a method is shown on screen for another of the characters that isn't anything like what happened between those two. Some sequences feel like they needed additional trimming, as there's little in the way of character or plot development that justifies being a beat or two longer than needed. Essentially, it feels a lot like a book that was adapted into a screenplay, and it ran into the problem of having to tell a condensed version of the story, which shortchanges some important elements in the process. No doubt that the book it was based on helps fill in some of the gaps, but that never excuses a film for overlooking them.
It's a shame, since Romero definitely has some big wins. Having a bigger budget meant being able to be a little more adventurous in aspects of the production, and in particular, Romero has a lot of fun with unusual camera techniques, particularly the very low to the ground effects that simulate Ella's unchecked movements, giving a nice kinetic feel to a film that by its nature is bound to a more stationary object more often than not. In addition to that, Romero does get the opportunity to indulge in material more in his neck of the woods, which run the gamut from early scenes that sell the soul-crushing frustration of Allan's new condition to a surprisingly tender and kinda kinky love scene later on. The acting isn't the best, although it was fun spotting the likes of Stanley Tucci and Stephen Root in some of their earliest roles, but the actors do their job and never run the risk of being too annoying, despite the need for many of them to be pretty difficult to like. Also, and I'm not sure it was intentional or not, but there's an intriguing element to how the film plays out that makes me wonder if it was ever intentional to try and sell it as a horror film, as Romero stages a lot of it like some kind of inspirational story of a broken man who finds the will to live again when an unexpected source of confidence enters his life again, complete with the sweeping score to underline that. It's not hard to imagine that, at some point, there may have been talks to try to sell it like that, so that the horror elements would come as a complete surprise.
After one of the craziest finales I can think of, someone who wasn't George Romero thought that the only proper way to end a film about the dangers of manifesting unchecked rage was to have an unambiguously happy ending, where Allan stops just short of winning the Super Bowl and going to Disney World to get just about everything else he could have wanted, consequence free. To say it's an unearned ending would be the understatement of the century, especially with this being a Romero film. In his best films, even the ones with definitive endings are deeply ambiguous, that even in the death of some, the lives of other characters carry on with an immense uncertainty that could almost be perfect sequel bait if it wasn't such a strong way to cap off what came before.
Night of the Living Dead famously denied us the satisfaction of anyone being able to make it through that situation unscathed, and yet it still felt like everyone else was worse off. I'm not sure how Romero would have wanted to have treated the ending to this film, but there's no way it'd be anything like what we got. Now there's a hypothetical question I'd like to see answered.
