There’s a lot of mud around slung in Monkey Shines, and a lot of mess to survive if you want to appreciate it. It’s a sloppy film, in too many ways, in too many directions, but it genuinely tries to burrow into humanity’s bowels in search of a rich vein of terror. It was writer-director George A. Romero’s first studio picture, and his last for quite a while, the obvious fruits of his successes with his genre-defining Dead trilogy. It also reflects a kind of conceptual challenge to himself. While his most famous films redefined the zombie genre, clarifying one kind of fear rooted in mobile bodies unable to be controlled by unthinking brains, Monkey Shines inverts the dynamic. Focusing on Allan (Jason Beghe), a man who is rendered a quadriplegic after a running accident but retains full control of his “civilized” brain, Monkey Shines turns the loss of physical motion into a carnal meditation on the nature of masculinity, into whether a functioning brain is enough man for a man to accept when he doesn’t feel at home in his own body anymore.

Ironically enough, it’s a bit like John Carpenter’s studio horror picture Christine in that regard, but rather than a turning to man’s inner machine, Romero tries to dissect an inner beast. When Allan’s friend Geoffrey (John Pankow) recommends a trained chimpanzee to provide companionship and perform small tasks around the house, he neglects to mention that Ella has been injected with an experimental drug designed to boost her intelligence, and that companionship with Allan may be what she needs to excite the mind. While things initially work out for the better, Allan’s rage issues seem to metastasize almost instantly, and he is also receiving visions of something running outside with an oddly simian gait, despite Ella ostensibly being locked in a cage. More than a scientific symbiosis, the relationship is a kind of mental merge between the two, with Ella coaxing out the rage in Allan and Allan galvanizing Ella to act.

There’s a lot packed in here, and Monkey Shines is an odd beast, one that mixes metaphors and both over and underexplains itself. The film’s narrative makes a kind of hash of its themes. Is Allan’s anger metastacized by the psychic attachment to Ella, or is Ella simply acting on an already violent personality, which we aren’t given any clues of beforehand? Are the outburst latent manifestations of his frustration or is it restoring something that was always there? Poignantly comparing himself to a machine in an early moment, the film doesn’t need the underscore of the scene’s on-the-nose final line to clarify the point that his masculine self-possession has been underwritten by his organic nature, his physical and bodily masculinity, and that he feels threatened without it. More poignant is a brief, unremarked comment by Melanie (Kate McNeil), Ella’s trainer: “she’s your slave,” implying that mastery over an animal is his way of feeling whole again.

Ye what, precisely, Ella really is in this metaphor can change on a scene to scene basis. If she is his slave, the animal is also Allan’s own inner beast, for Monkey Shines is, in the broadest strokes, a fairly direct riff of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde variety, a film that looks back 100 years to anther late-century panic attack about Darwinian evolution. Another exploration of the tensions of civilization that can’t fully stitch together the beating animal heart lying beneath, or so many Americans worried in the 1880s and apparently again in the 1980s. That’s a rich enough vein for a horror film, but one that easily can turn regressive, to which Monkey Shines responds by also making Ella a kind of pseudo-love interest for Allan who seems closer to her than anyone in the human world, a theme that is kinky enough on its own, but does little to clarify the others. Monkey Shines wants to say that the monkey is mankind’s inner beast that must be acknowledged to be tamed, but also that science shouldn’t really try to tame it in the first place. Allan can’t kill because he has “5000 years of civilization bred into him,” he remarks, but with science thinning the space between man and animal, he becomes a “guinea pig” of centuries of scientific advancement, an attempt to surpass human modernity that ultimately exposes its limits. What we’re meant to take from this varies on a scene-to-scene basis.

Worse, in inverting elements of Romero’s Dead trilogy, Monkey Shines brings out the wrong elements of their politics. While Romero’s zombie films turned the zombie mythos’s origins in Haitian voodoo and white fears about an unleashed horde of vengeful slaves into a latent rather than manifest terror, they at least got that the zombie figure, which interrogated assumptions of self-sovereignty and self-control, was an ideal means to satirize 20^th century civilization. Monkey Shines, though,critiques civilization only insofar as it is worried about what it can’t quite overcome. Civilization fails to overcome our animal nature, but it doesn’t itself produce things worthy of condemnation. Civilization is hypocritical at worst, but not quite immanently worthy of critique. In this sense, the ghost of Edgar Allen’s Poe The Murders in the Rue Morgue haunts Monkey Shines. In that famous story, which has often been read as a metaphor for America’s fear of racial others let loose upon an unprepared (white) populace, an uncontrollable orangutan commits a pair of superhuman murders in a locked room with a pair of scissors.

Still, it’s hard to write off the film, much for the same reason it’s hard to write off the barely-functioning C-pictures of yesteryear that this film harkens back to. There’s real meat on this film’s bones, and some of the morsels are pretty tasty. Beghe is all meat and potatoes as Allan – not a good performance per-se, but the porterhouse texture of his jaw still achieves its necessary function in the narrative, a male puppet in the film’s science experiment – and Pankow is neurotic and tetchy enough to rival Jeffrey Combs’s mad scientist in Re-Animator. And the film works at such cross-purposes and confusions that it can be as intoxicating as infuriating. When Allan erupts at one point at his nurse, he angrily remarks that when they don’t perform “certain functions,” he gets mad, tacitly suggesting his own superhuman id melding with a class politics. Little slivers like this never really develop in the film – is Ella a proletarian? Is Allan a controlling man, a bestial inner creature, a bourgeois superior? – but they don’t make for boring viewing.

Romero the director, meanwhile, is in domestic drama mode for the first half, but he comes alive later. After a long build-up, he stages the early deaths in a disarmingly casual register. A chaotic, quicksilver POV leads up to one murder, but before the actual kill we get a cut to black and a match lit in a blank void.  A later murder in a bathtub plays like a slantwise riff on Psycho (speaking of pat-Freudianism) until it becomes the bit in Frenzy where a foot just won’t stay in a potato bag. Which is odd given the film’s own low-rent Rear Window homage, except rather than viewing the neighbors, Allan witnesses Ella’s psychic explorations as out of body experiences.

This all erupts in a truly brazen finale which derives suspense out of Allan being nearly unable to move his wheelchair a few feet because of a body on the floor, and a simultaneously harrowing and farcical climax in which life or death, even the cosmic fitness of the universe, seem to hinge on his ability to move his finger over to a tape-recorder, after he has wooed Ella with claims of “play, like we used to” and “take me away Baby,” speaking both to a genuine communion with the animal and a kind of perverse autoerotic asphyxia where the monkey’s body fulfills the brain’s desires. Here, the film suggests a gleefully subversive comedy of terrors. We’ve wandered into a strange parody of Bedtime for Bonzo, a film starring the then (in 1988) President of the U.S. where he must babysit a monkey. (Shades of Jordan Peele’s Nope, and the racial implications of the observed and performing animal, along with the black cowboy taming the cinematic beast of Hollywood). But if this is a comedy, it is playing out at far more subtextual a level than any of the comedy-horrors usually celebrated form this era.

In the realm of ‘80s horror about mad science run amok, this is no The Fly, and in the realm of ‘80s horror comedies about mad science run amok, this is no Re-Animator, but there are a few moments when you wish those films were as internally confused as this one. Excuse all the references, but I hope the sloppiness of the review exposes something about the film, and its bizarre, somewhat intertextual nature. To wit: throughout, there’s also a prominent poster of Casablanca hovers behind the primary action, along with an extended riff on a bird named after Humphrey Bogart. Was this runner only to add texture to the “play, like we used to” line, that now sounds like Bogart’s immortal “Play it again, Sam,” a lament for a lost past tragically unable to continue, albeit here played as an absurdist moan? What were they thinking? I’m not sure, but I’m kind of pleased they thought it.

Score: 7/10