BLOOD MONKEY

Six university students venture into the heart of a jungle in Asia to reach Professor Hamilton, a scientific researcher conducting research inside a crater previously unexplored by humans where a new race of primates, more intelligent and fierce than usual, seems to have evolved. The professor's goal is naturally to capture a live specimen, but the endeavor won't be simple. "Blood Monkey" or how to make a film with killer monkeys without having the possibility to show them. Although not as frequently as sharks, crocodiles, spiders, and snakes, it's not the first time a monkey has been chosen as a threat within a horror film. There are many films that have featured a primate threatening humans, and among them, we can quickly cite the small cult classic "Link" by Richard Franklin, the interesting "Monkey Shines – An Experiment in Fear" by George Romero, and the mediocre "Shakma – The Monkey That Kills" by Tom Logan and Hugh Parks. But "Blood Monkey" seems to have higher ambitions, and its model of inspiration is not any of the titles mentioned above but rather the famous novel "Congo" by Michael Crichton, adapted for the big screen in 1995 by Frank Marshall. Unfortunately, however, we're talking about a low-quality TV movie, and thus the chances of creating a work comparable to Marshall's were nil from the start. Directed by Robert Young and also known by the title "The Killer Monkeys," the film in question presents itself without many words as the emblem of nothingness, as we are forced, for about an hour and a half, to watch stupid individuals who do nothing but walk through the jungle, talk, shoot, and flee from monkeys that are never actually shown, except for a little more than a second in the poor ending devoid of any narrative logic. One then wonders, why make a film of this kind if you don't have the possibility to show the film's basic element?! Throughout the duration of the film, only continuous subjectives of the monster hiding among the trees and a papier-mâché skull found by the professor, nothing more. As mentioned a few lines above, the fearsome creatures are only shown for an instant in the last scene before the credits and you, who for the entire time have done nothing but think "When the hell are you going to show me the monkeys?", are forced to reconsider, regretting the moments when the easy expedient of the subjective was used. The monstrous primates so highly praised throughout the work (and of which a skull with an exaggeratedly high cranial volume is shown) are nothing more than simple gorillas created, as one might expect, with a painfully crude and primitive computer graphic. The film suffers from enormous problems at the script level. The narrative is tired, excessively repetitive, and lacks real events capable of providing a proper evolution to the story. Only in the last minutes, when the story finally seems to have headed toward a proper horror film climax, the credits start, the film ends unexpectedly, leaving an annoying sense of incompleteness to the viewer. All the characters appear far too stereotypical and, therefore, uninteresting, starting with the vile Professor Hamilton played by a bewildered F. Murray Abraham ("Amadeus," "Scarface," "Last Action Hero") who gives the researcher overly caricatured tones of a "bastard" willing to do anything to make his discovery known. In short, there's really nothing interesting brewing. There are certainly worse films out there, but this remains a weak TV movie that is really too poor in content.