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Blood Monkey

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Okay, I admit it. I love bad movies. I mean train-wreck bad. I mean train-wreck-crashing-through-a-kindergarten-class-of-orphans bad. After many years of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fandom, I've simply developed a taste for cinematic ineptitude. It's a real hoot.

But sadly, despite the promisingly silly title, Blood Monkey was a big let down. Was it bad? Well, duh! It's called Blood Monkey, for godsakes! Of course it's bad! What did you expect? But was it fun-bad? Sadly, no. It wasn't a spectacular disaster in the way I was hoping. It was merely lame.

To the filmmakers' credit, things could have been A LOT worse. I've seen MUCH worse from the good folks over on the Sci-Fi Channel. (S.S. Doomtrooper, anyone? Sweet Lord a'mighty, THAT one will leave a mark!)

Clearly this movie was shot for about eleven dollars (ten of which, I'm sure went straight into the pocket of the perpetually slumming Mr. Abraham), but surprisingly the location work is actually pretty good. Unlike most movies of this ilk, this wasn't shot in some abandoned warehouse in Bulgaria. The rainforest locations used here are actually pretty stunning.

The acting, on the other hand ... well, it's about as godawful as you'd expect. Made all the worse because Abraham actually seems to be putting a little effort into it. Not that he's going to win any awards, but his baseline competence makes the amateur-porn-level "performances" of the kids stand out in even starker relief.

And yes, for a movie entitled "Blood Monkey," there's precious little actual monkey in it. Mercifully, we only get about 12 frames of terrible CG gorilla in the closing nanoseconds of the film. Which, in many ways, is smart, I suppose. If all you've got is an awful CG gorilla, it's best not to show it very much. However, if you're like me, the more bad CG gorilla they show, the funnier the movie could be. So, for me, I definitely mourned the lack of monkey.

The upshot is, if you're in the market for a good, scary movie ... then what the hell are you doing on the Blood Monkey page!? You should know better! Have you no sense at all, man?

But if you're looking for an unintentionally hilarious campy movie that you can roundly mock with your friends ... well, this isn't it either. It's too incompetent to be good ... but it's too competent to be fun.

Although there is one unintentionally hilarious scene where a troop of unseen Blood Monkeys in the canopy rain urine down upon the campsite of our hapless heroes below. Clearly they must have access to tanker trucks full of Mountain Dew in the middle of the rainforest because the fire-hose-like strength and volume of the Blood Monkey urinary stream is quite something to behold!

Though, sadly, one scene of researchers being peed on by murderous, blood-thirsty gorillas is just not enough for me to recommend this film.

Before RHI Entertainment decided that the opening scene of every movie had to show the monster in all its badly-rendered CGI glory; before the studio decided that gore shots were the only thing anybody cared about; before the company gave up trying to make interesting movies, there was Blood Monkey.

Mind you, Blood Monkey is not good. But Blood Monkey tries so hard that I can't help but admire its moxie.

Blood Monkey begins with the usual monster attack scene, but it doesn't show the monkey. Which is actually a gorilla. Scratch that, according to Professor Hamilton (F. Murray Abraham, lost in a jungle far away from his Oscar-winning role) it's more like a clan of sasquatches, the missing evolutionary link to humans and apes.

Anyway, Profession Hamilton is mad - quite mad! - and in his egomaniacal grab for fame ropes in a bunch of stereotypical graduate students into the jungles of Thailand. There's the jock (Matt Reeves), the hot chick (Laura Aikman), the nerd (Sebastian Armesto), the perky reporter (Freishia Bomambehran), the final girl (Amy Manson) and the serious guy (Matt Ryan). Hamilton thoughtfully provides a tracking bracelet so that he can keep track of their corpses as the bloodthirsty gorillas kidnap and dismember the grad students. This plan, if you can call it a plan, is doomed from the start.

Ironically, Blood Monkey is at its best when not showing any monkeys. The graduate students' fear is palpable even if they are a collective bunch of idiots there to die for our amusement and the monkey's pleasure. Abraham chews up the scenery more than the gorillas chew on their victims. If it weren't for the wooden acting, the long stretches of dialogue that amount to nothing, and the sheer stupidity of the students, this could actually be a pretty good horror movie. But then you get to the part with the pee.

Oh the pee! Monkeys, you see, pee on their prey. It's a form of dominance. And it's got to be the funniest thing ever to grace a horror movie.

These monkeys don't just pee...they PEE, unleashing a gout of urine that lasts for minutes on end, enough to make the hapless victims think its raining. There are ways to film this that might have been less chortle-worthy, maybe by not showing the streams pouring from off screen - actually forget about it, there's simply no way to have monkeys pee on you in a movie and not have it be side-splittingly hilarious.

The movie tries hard to recover from all the peeing, but any pretense of f horror is over. We end on a down-note inspired by the Blair Witch Project with a night vision camera and a final reveal of the aforementioned blood gorilla.

But all I kept thinking was: man those monkeys drank a lot. And you will need to if you want to enjoy this film.

BLOOD MONKEY

This film was the first in the on going series of films called the "Maneater" series and while it is far from a classic it is not as bad as some say. In fact when compared to other films that debut on The SyFy channel this is some what good. I have to admit that am I not only a fan of the series but a fan of bad B movies so this series is right up my alley. Will I lie and say this is the best movie ever, no, and in fact it is not even the best in the series. I feel the best thus far from the ones I have seen is "Eye of the Beast" but you will have to read that review to find out about it.

The story is all about a group of young students I believe that are studying in a field related to nature I suppose, why else would they be there. Any way they are brought there by a crazy Professor who may or may not know about the deadly creatures that lay in wake for them. There is the typical male role who is the jock type that thinks he is the man, a chick with a camera to document it all, a "geek" as society would label him and your average bunch of college kids. Add in the crazy professor and is fine but mean assistant and you have the characters in this movie. As they make their way through the jungle and pass obstacle after obstacle in comes the Blood Monkeys or apes or gorillas or what ever.

This movie is far from perfect because other than F. Murray Abraham no one in this film is a fine thespian it would seem. Abraham is really the only one that is actually good in this because the others are either plain bad or just uh, which means forgettable or just there for body count. Well the guy who was making it at the end was ok as was the "geek" guy but that was it. George LaVoo and Gary Dauberman really need to work on the script because while the intentions were obviously good since it is entertaining at times it was just a bad rip off of "Congo". Robert Young is the director of this and while it is like I said not the best film ever at least it moves along and has some interesting moments in it.

With that said in the last line one of the best moments on this movie is when the monkeys or apes or gorillas or whatever mark their territory or should I say their prey when they let loose with the juice all over the tents that the group are sleeping in. they think it is just rain which makes it even better and a part involving a foot is really the only legit tense moment in the film. Also there are a few funny parts as far as dialogue and a moment when they come down a cliff is pretty good. The thing that is best about this film though is the beautiful setting in the jungle which for a low budget flick is marvelous. I think they actually filmed this in Thailand from what I have read, it shows trust me.

Like I said this movie is far from the worst movie ever but at the same time it is not very memorable other than the marking scene. Would I recommend this movie to who ever is reading this, well that depends. I think every one should ultimately judge a film for themselves so in the way maybe you should check it out but to be honest you could skip it. If you like bad B movies and things like nature run muck flicks then this may be for you, maybe.

There's not much I can add to the other reviewers but to berate the talentless goons that thought this movie should be made. I, like some that have contributed their comments, love bad movies. A taste that has refined courtesty of Mystery Science 3000. This stinker goes beyond mockery. I found my self very quickly rooting for the invisible apes and hoping the carnage would extend to the writers, producers and all others responsible for it's creation. They would have done better using cardboard cut outs... oops sorry, they did and tried to disguise them with the label "actors". A recreation of this film may be made at home by putting on some red tinted sunglasses, (apparently apes only see in red), and running around the back yard urinating with gusto and shouting GRRRR or whoop whoop. Even so you'll probably have spent 10 times as much on the glasses than was the buget for this turkey.
May I humbly suggest standing in a tub of ice water with a bucket on your head and banging it with a hammer for over an hour. This will provide a similar effect to that of watching Bloodmonkey!

It is unfathomable that the makers behind this dreck believed they were making a good movie. You can't blame the production values. Everything was in focus. They shot it in the jungles of Thailand. They got an Academy Award Winning Actor to be in it.

Now I'm assuming that the people responsible for this are from my generation. Kids who grew up watching so-bad-they're-good drive-in B-movies that are still worth watching. You know, like the original 1980 HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP where mutant salmon (who look suspiciously like the ALIEN from the year before) who rape hot young coeds during their spawning cycle. Hilarious. If they're younger, they had "Mystery Science Theatre 3000."

So my question is:

How can the filmmakers make such a pedestrian, humorless, empty horror film? No wit, no momentum...no fun. The acting is bad. The writing is stunningly bland. No pay off of any kind.

Like most of the reviewers here, I'm sure, we watched this slop on the Sci-Fi Channel. I can't imagine anyone who would buy it. Maybe if there was some nudity--which at least made those terrible 70s drive-in movies at least watchable. Nudity never redeemed a bad horror movie but at least you could say, "Well, that was terrible...but that one chick was smokin' hot."

As the movie closed in on its climax, I kept looking at the clock and thinking that the Blood Monkeys better show up pretty soon. They do. For about six seconds. The End. You will feel totally cheated.

This is just Bad Bad. Not Good Bad.

A movie with a snappy title like Blood Monkey just cries out to be watched, but the title is all it's really got going for it. In fact, even the title is a lie-It's a friggin' ape, not a monkey!!
Some anthropology students are lured into the jungle by anthropologist F. Murray Abraham, only to find out they're on the menu for a "new species" Abraham has discovered. It's a giant ape(or is it a whole tribe of apes? The movie never seems too clear on that point, but we assume it's only one ape) thought to be the "missing link".
What the makers of this film seemed to forget is that when you're making a creature feature, people wanna see the damn creature!! They don't wanna see a bunch of irritating pinheads stumbling around the jungle for an hour. And even when you do see the ape in very brief flashes, it's a very lousy looking CGI creation that makes the original King Kong(or Son of Kong for that matter....or hell, even The Mighty Gorga!) look terrifying.
The group of victims are the standard stereotypes. You got the intelligent types(they all have foreign accents, that's how we know they're intelligent), a horny jock type jerk, the hot blond worrying about her makeup, and of course the silent hero type. You're actually supposed to believe that these are anthropology students.
While the scenery was nice, and the story wouldn't necessarily be considered boring or uninteresting, there is a surprising lack of Blood Monkeying around, minimal gore(though some of it decent looking), irritating characters(even poor Abraham isn't given enough of a villain role to work with. He could have at least been a big scenery chewer), and an awful looking and barely seen "monster".
This is a chapter in the "Maneater Series" that you can skip guilt-free.

I will not make any other comments about how auful this movie was but i only will ask this. Anybody seen the...MONKEY ?
Did u see the monkey ?
Did u mam ?
Did u thomas ?
And u...PETER ?
Errr...Where the F13 hell was the monkey ?

PS.

I think i will go buy a pair of...glasses. I'm getting old and i'm starting not seeing INVINSIBLE BLOOD S$IT MONKEYS...AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Chimpanzees are apes not monkeys but I suppose that's a moot point when you've just made one of the worst films in history and you're looking for a catchy title to hang the whole thing on.

Amadeus is looking like a long time ago isn't it F. Murray??

Ok, this is a B movie. It isn't good and it isn't that bad either. I thought it was ok and deserved a look. The acting was that of a B horror flick as well as the special effects. You can't expect much with B movies or movies with a name like Blood Monkey. Yes, this movie is a mixture of the "The Blair Witch Project" and "Survival Island" saying that the "The Blair Witch Project" was imaginative and "Survival Island" being the stupid one. Have a look if you are a lover of the B movie genre.

BLOOD MONKEY stars renowned, Oscar-winning actor, F. Murray Abraham as a scientist who lures a group of college students into the deep jungle in search of the elusive title creatures. Abraham chews, swallows, and digests the scenery, while leading the young, beautiful people closer to their doom. MONKEY is a fairly dull, predictable affair, w/ little blood, and even less monkey. When we finally get a glimpse of the beasts (at the very end!), they are pretty disappointing. Still, it was worth it just to witness the tent-drenching urination sequence...