Christopher Atkins wins the the award for Best Overacting in a Horror Film for 1990, hands down. In fact, I can’t think of anybody who has a better “I just found my dead friend” reaction face. Other actors and actresses in movies like this tend to scream or run away or shut their eyes really tight, but Mr. Blue Lagoon is confident enough to take it slow. REALLY slow. A good half-hour of this movie are all shots of him looking bug-eyed, gradually slacking his jaw and genuinely appearing to lose his mind at the sight of one of his medical school cohorts turned into monkey meat. No, that’s not the director using a slow motion effect. That’s raw acting talent.
Anyway, this is one of the better killer monkey movies. It made me hungry for bananas right away. A group of medical students whose studies include seemingly benign work on a baboon lock themselves in the school’s high rise building overnight to compete in a live-action role-playing game! There are somehow no phones anywhere. Most of the students are classic slasher movie ax bait. And only Roddy McDowall (as their instructor, who’s sort of the game’s “Dungeonmaster” for reasons that are unclear) has the keys to get out.
Do I even need to tell you that people start dying?
Turns out that the baboon was supposed to be quietly sent to heaven on sleepy drugs, but then Chris Adkins made the classic Frankenstein mistake and pulled the wrong thing off the shelf and turned the baboon into a face-eating killer, a rabid red-assed butcher, a new kind of slasher for the 90s.
The result is a lot of repetitive kills, chases and about fifty-seven scenes of the baboon ramming its head and body harshly against closed doors. It’s a clumsy movie in many ways, but, HOLY SHIT, they use A REAL BABOON. That’s impressive today, when even mega-budget filmmakers wouldn’t go near a real baboon. They’d just get some computer nerds to digitally create one. Back in analog 1990 though, they had to be more clever. How does a filmmaker get a baboon to act like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet? Simple. You choose a male baboon for your killer and then every time you need him to lose his mind, you bring in a (hidden) female baboon in heat and have him try to break through an obstacle to get to her. He will go absolutely INSANE, as we see here.
Hopefully, our baboon eventually got himself plenty of sex. He WAS in a movie, after all. Yes, it went straight-to-video in the mainstream world, but this had to have been the Movie of the Decade in the baboon world. This is their Titanic.